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Hello! Chinese New Year starts exactly one week from today ~ February 19th. Chinese New Year celebrates the wish of "good fortune" to everyone in the year ahead, & it is the perfect time for your family to have a little fun, celebrate another culture, spend time together & eat some yummy authentic Asian food. I’m so excited to be sharing some of our family’s favorite Chinese New Year traditions (like red-envelope gifts!), a free mini lantern printable & how we used Tai Pei® restaurant inspired appetizers that come in chicken, pork, shrimp, and vegetable flavors for a fun (& easy!) Chinese New Year celebration dinner. So let’s get started! ;)
We have celebrated Chinese New Year several times over the years. My kiddos have so much fun with it. I made a list of some of the things we have done & that worked really well for our family. :)
- check out books from the library on China & Chinese New Year
- take the legs off the kitchen table & have dinner on the floor! (Yes, we did this one year, & the kiddos loved it!)
- make Chinese dragons out of cardboard boxes & construction paper
- get an atlas or globe & find out where China is
- learn how to say the Chinese New Year Greeting ~ “Gung hay fat choy.”
- eat dinner with chopsticks (No forks allowed!)
- Chinese New Year animal charades ~ Each year is represented by a different animal in the Chinese calendar. 2015 is the year of the sheep! Take turns acting out each one & have the other family members guess which one you are.
- make paper lanterns (I’ll be sharing a printable for that!)
- make a special Chinese inspired dinner for the whole family
- no cleaning on the first day of Chinese New Year (Your kiddos will love this!) ;) According to Chinese tradition you will sweep out all of your good fortune if you sweep on Chinese New Year.
- exchange red envelopes ~ Traditionally money is given in red envelopes during Chinese New Year. We write notes to each other instead, and then I give the kiddos gold wrapped chocolate as “money”.
The one activity we always do is make Chinese paper lanterns. We use the traditional Chinese colors of red & gold (yellow) to make the lanterns with. You can download the printable below to make some mini Chinese lanterns.
Cut them out leaving about a half inch border around the whole lantern. Fold them in half on the dotted line, and then cut through each solid colored line.
Roll your lantern up & then staple in place.
We decorated our house with tons of these little lanterns. :)
Another fun Chinese New Year tradition is giving the gift of money in a red envelope. Since my kiddos have already taken all of my money (ha!) I made cute take out boxes & filled them with gold (also known as gold wrapped chocolate!). ;)
We still wanted to carry on the red envelope tradition. So we decorated red envelopes with Chinese characters & wrote notes to each other inside.
We used them on the table when we had our authentic Chinese meal. The kiddos had fun opening their red envelopes. :)
For our authentic Chinese meal we found Tai Pei® Mini Spring Rolls and Tai Pei® Egg Rolls at our local Walmart in the freezer section.
These yummy products are loaded with traditional style and flavors of chicken, pork or shrimp & vegetables. They are authentic Asian appetizers (perfect for Chinese New Year!), & I love that they are ready in just a few minutes. They also come with their own dipping sauce. Yay! I loved the crunchy outside, & I loved all the veggies inside with plenty of flavorful meat. My kiddos loved the taste & asked for more. You can’t beat that ~ especially with my picky eaters. ;)
You can tell they enjoyed our Chinese New Year celebration. :)
You can find everything you need to host an amazing Chinese New Year
celebration & lots of yummy Tai Pei® Good Fortune in Every Box™ at Walmart.
Make sure you check out the Chinese New Year app on the Tai Pei® Facebook page. The Red Envelope tab will include a coupon and will run until coupons run out. So hurry! Have you ever celebrated Chinese New Year? If so, I'd love to hear about your traditions! Leave a comment below. :)
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This post was created for Ginger Snap Crafts by Ginger Bowie.
