Lunar New Year with Leah
One morning this week, my husband said to me, “I know you always say how much work American holidays are but Lunar New Year always seems to be a lot more work.
He’s not wrong. As a Chinese mom whose family went through generations of diaspora, I am near obsessive about keeping my family traditions alive and making Lunar New Year as important to my kids as my mom and PoPo (maternal grandmother in Cantonese) made it for me. When I had kids of my own, I quickly realized that much like Christmas, all that holiday magic is the result of many days of parental preparation.
Usually, about a week before the big day where we go to source all the decorations, flowers, Buddhist/Taoist altar offerings, new clothes and new haircuts. We didn’t go this year due to the pandemic but every year, this is what puts me in the spirit of the holiday. Seeing all the vendors and shoppers haggling over prices, selecting just the right fruit and blooms, everyone united in celebrating this one holiday in America to keep us in touch with our roots. It’s a multigenerational activity in my family, one where the act of simply being there results in a transference of knowledge from elder to child. And it doesn’t hurt to have more people to carry the bags. This year, we did the majority of our shopping online and I can’t help but feel the kids really missed out so I took them out for extra special haircuts at one of those salons that have cars for seats and balloons and candy when it’s over.
There are a lot of ways we found to make a pandemic Lunar New Year special. We found a new book called PoPo’s Lucky Day by Virginia Loh-Hagan about a little girl explaining her family’s new year traditions as she learned from her PoPo. I hope that gave the kids a sense of belonging, seeing their shared experiences in the pages. We made our own dragon puppets out of construction paper and some chopsticks since there would be no festivals where they could see professional lion and dragon dancers. We decorated the house with lanterns on the house and trees, couplets on the door and Fu papercuts in the windows. We had a huge feast on Lunar New Year’s Eve with all their favorite festive foods despite the distinct lack of people at our table.
They worked on their best “Gong Hei Fat Choy” and “Gong Xi Fa Cai” for their family Zoom on New Year’s Day though I’m still not entirely sure how exciting virtual red envelopes can be. I made sure to put smaller bills in more envelopes so they could go to bed with an abundance of lai see under their pillows just in case.
