Chinese New Year 2017

This Chinese New Year is The Year of the Rooster and begins on Saturday January 28 and lasts until February 15th, 2018. The new year, also known as the Spring Festival, is marked by the lunisolar Chinese calendar, so the date changes each year.

Every Chinese New Year is characterised by one of 12 animals which appear in the Chinese zodiac. The Chinese zodiac is divided into 12 blocks (or houses) , but with the major difference being that each house has a time-length of one year instead of one month.

This year it’s the Year of the Rooster, which is the tenth animal in the cycle. The next Year of the Rooster won’t be until 2029.

So this Chinese new year I decided to teach my daughter what it was about and how it is different from our traditional new year calendar and in doing so we decided to make it fun by having our own little feast of Chinese food to celebrate the Chinese new year in our own way. Its important to me to teach our kids about different cultures and to enjoy and respect each and everyone’s beliefs.

At the dinner table we leant how to say a few basic words in Chinese like thank you, hello and your welcome. We also learnt a few facts such as that Firecrackers are popular during the Chinese New Year as they are thought to scare off evil spirits.

The little feast we served up consisted of homemade Hot & Sour Soup, Pork char siu,Noodles,Rice,Plain Chicken Chunks (mainly for the toddler) and duck with a plum sauce. We also had prawn crackers and Chinese green tea on the table and some fortune cookies for afterwards.

It all went down a treat and I even got our little man to try the green tea and he seemed to not hate the taste or spit it out. Our daughter on the other hand wasn’t impressed with it and didn’t like the taste.

Heres a few Pictures of what we enjoyed