One-Yard Wonders projects

Friday, January 31, 2014

Happy Chinese New Year!

Well our first Chinese New Year celebration was a resounding success! I am quite sure it will become a new family tradition for us.

The main focus of our party was food. What else? We were all anticipating our delicious meal from CHC -- the best Chinese restaurant in the state. Shawn is friends with the owners so he stopped by at noon to place our dinner order and ask if they had any recommendations for traditional New Year foods. We found out that they ate all the traditional foods on Thursday. Maybe it's like our Christmas Eve dinners.

Anyway, we ordered a lot of stuff and have plenty of leftovers for tomorrow. Bo and Violet shared shrimp fried rice. Shawn and Mazy ordered wide noodles with scallops. I got lo mein with scallops. Mazy also ordered jalapeno chicken. We had an order of potstickers and the restaurant suggested shrimp/chive dumplings. Everything was delicious!! The restaurant also included a free bag of melon-flavored cakes for our dessert! I had also picked up some fortune cookies. It was a great meal. Oh, and we learned that noodles are a traditional food because they bring good luck -- long life, longevity, etc.

On Thursday, I went to the Asian grocery store and bought several treats for us, including these four drinks:

 We all taste-tested each drink. Violet got most of the lychee drink on the left, Bo had the mango drink, and Shawn and Mazy shared the grape and strawberry drinks in the funny glass bottles. Those things were so cool! To open them, you take off the lid and push a glass marble down through the spout, which opens it up so you can drink it. It's really crazy! 

 Mazy and the melon-flavored cakes.

 After dinner, we all colored Chinese New Year coloring pages. This is the year of the horse, so we had lots of horse pages. Another fun tradition we did was give each of the kids a little red envelope with cash in it! A friend from work gave us the authentic red envelopes. This is Violet ripping hers up... 

 Mazy with his envelope and $2.

 Bo with his loot.


 All of us coloring! Notice the orange peels on the table. Another tradition is to eat oranges and tangerines -- they bring good luck. We also did a little research about other traditions, and one of them is to clean your house out to sweep away the bad omens and bad luck of the past year. So tomorrow we'll clean out our house!

 Mazy and some of his drawings. 

Bo and some of his drawings! 

And to cap off our celebration, we watched a Scooby Doo episode that takes place in Beijing. We were looking for the episode that happens during Chinese New Year but we couldn't find it, so we just settled for one that was in China. All in all, it was a really great night! We all learned some new cool facts about China's longest and most popular holiday. 

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