…and make sure your rice pot is full to the brim tonight. So that in the year of the Fire Monkey, starting this Lunar New Year (8 February) you’ll never be short of food.

Wear red and decorate your house with it – assuming, that is, you want to frighten off the monsters that might otherwise attack. And set off firecrackers, monsters really hate that – they’ll slink away without harming you. New Year’s a time for cleaning the house (make sure scissors and knives and brooms are out of the way on New Year’s day, though. Don’t want any of that good luck to be swept up and thrown out, or cut…) Clear your debts and make peace with people, only have happy conversations.

And then there’s food. Lots and lots and lots of food. There’s the Tray of Togetherness – eight (that lucky number again) compartments, full of candied fruits and other delicacies, so the year ahead will be sweet too. And not to forget Yee Sang, a salad of vegetables and sesame seeds and other things including jellyfish (never thought I would eat jellyfish). We all got to toss the Yee Sang together with our chopsticks, to mix in the honey dressing. And we made a glorious, auspicious mess.

A traditional New Dinner feast, at least amongst Malaysian Chinese, includes a whole chicken for completeness, dried oysters because in Cantonese the word for these also means ‘good news’, fish, for abundance, and and and…

And then, of course, there are the flying oranges. Fruit is an important part of the celebrations, pineapples for example call riches to come. Anything that’s gold or yellow is a symbol of wealth, so oranges and kumquats are a popular gift – no need to worry about our vitamin C intake for a while.

If you happen to see a lion dance you are lucky*. There’s a lot of noise to frighten away evil spirits. As part of the dance the lions eat pineapples and oranges, and in the performance we saw yesterday they threw oranges into the crowd. If you catch one, I guess that’s very lucky. If however one hits you… well that’s maybe not so lucky.

 

Gong Xi Fa Chai, everybody!

* The dancers train all year, and the Malaysian team regularly wins International Lion Dance competitions.