恭喜發財 It's the Year of the Dog!



Happy Lunar New Year, a little belated but it's a long holiday. I won't waste time talking about the meaning of the Chinese Year, you can probably get that from a zillion websites, but I can talk a little about how this year of the dog has started for us. To some, dog is man's best friend but I have always preferred other pets. Cats are twice the intelligence with half the maintenance and monkeys are as fun as well a whole barrel of monkeys, but that's another discussion. Come to think of it though, a cute dog like the one in the clip art above would be good for a dinner those cold winter nights...

One tradition is that our children receive 紅包 or a red packet that contains money from older relatives. A second tradition is that we eat 年糕, which is a sticky rice cake. It is made in different ways in different parts of China. Sometimes it is sweet and sometimes it is salty (this link describes a recipe from Ningpo near Shanghai). To us it also means various festivals, parades and a special event I'll talk about in our next post.