By: Sarah Wang, Staff Writer
Commonly known as the spring festival in China, Lunar New Year is a fifteen-day celebration which marks the beginning of a lunar year and spring. In the zodiac, 2024 is the year of the dragon. The Lunar New Year Assembly at Marymount included an exciting face-changing performance, a chopstick relay race, and dragon dancing.
The tradition of many families during Lunar New Year is to cut red paper artistically and stick it on the windows, decorate doors with red calligraphy couplets, and give out red envelopes to signify fortune and luck in the coming year. The Lunar New Year reunion dinner is often the highpoint that jumpstarts the holiday; everyone in the family gathers around the table and feasts on fish, dumplings and longevity noodles, and hotpot, which symbolizes fortune, long life, and abundance. The students in the Asian Affinity Group at Marymount celebrate the spring festival by “eating hotpot, receiving red envelopes, cleaning the house in preparation, and calling everyone in the family to greet each other on the new year.”
Many places, including our school, celebrate Lunar New Year by wearing red, which symbolizes good fortune, safety, and joy. This symbolism is rooted in an ancient Chinese myth in which a monster, Nian, terrorizes villages during the New Year celebrations. The people run up the mountains to hide, but they forget to pull down the red decorations and stop the firecrackers. Nian runs away, scared of the sound and the color red. Because of this, red became the symbol of good fortune and luck in the Lunar New Year.
The Joritan 