If you are interested in how Chinese people celebrate their biggest festival which has prolonged history, you should come and see Spring Festival,the Chinese New Year.
The Spring Festival is the time to go back to your family and get together with all your family members no matter how busy or far you are. As for myself, every year I go back to home by train since I went to college, after 44 hours, with 4000 kilometers trip, I'm at home.
During the Spring Festival, there are couple things you won't miss: making and eating dumplings with family at the New Year's Eve, enjoying the fire flower at the same time, and watching the Spring Festival Gala from the CCTV.Burning fireworks was once the most typical custom on the Spring Festival. People thought the spluttering sound could help drive away evil spirits. However, such an activity was completely or partially forbidden in big cities once the government took security, noise and pollution factors into consideration. As a replacement, some buy tapes with firecracker sounds to listen to, some break little balloons to get the sound too, while others buy firecracker handicrafts to hang in the living room.
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Waking up on New Year, everybody dresses up. First they extend greetings to their parents. Then each child will get money as a New Year gift, wrapped up in red paper. People in northern China will eat jiaozi, or dumplings, for breakfast, as they think "jiaozi" in sound means "bidding farewell to the old and ushering in the new". Also, the shape of the dumpling is like gold ingot from ancient China. So people eat them and wish for money and treasure.
According to history records, the Spring Festival derives from god and ancestor worships in the Shang dynasty. Nowadays, this superstitious meaning has faded away and is replaced with a symbol of unification, happiness and hope.
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