Happy New Year, everyone!
Yesterday was Day #1 of the Chinese New Year, and it went by in a flash. Because we're cleaning house and packing to go to Singapore this weekend, we had no decorations, no pineapple tarts, no red packets, no firecrackers, no xinyao music and no lions or dragons.
We did have clementines, though.
An abundance of them, which is wonderfully auspicious.
While we had zero celebrations (of the noisy, jubilant, red-everywhere sort) at home, we brought the festivities to the schools! I visited Kate's, Emily's and Jenna's classes and talked to the kids about new year traditions. The respective daughter whose class it was, sat up front with me and demonstrated different lanterns and distributed clementines. It was a lot of fun, and I am always a little heartsick when I have to leave classrooms, particularly where the students are older, as in the case of Emily's class. I miss the classroom environment so much!
That took the whole day, though, and we were all tired at the end of it. When we got home, Emily asked to please put up a little bit of decoration, so we hung up the lovely banner in the first photo that her auntie Joy made us last year. And also one red plastic lantern.
Uncle James came to have supper with us, though! So we had a kind of a reunion dinner - one entire day late - with meatloaf and brownies. Not exactly longevity noodles, but anything with chocolate in it is auspicious in my book.
And that was the sum total of our observation of the Year of the Dragon. We arrive in Singapore on Day #6, so there will be plenty of time to catch the spirt of the new year and celebrate!
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