For Kids: The ancient Chinese honored their many gods and personal ancestors every day. They believed in magical dragons and monsters. They held many festivals to honor their gods and ancestors. They even held an annual birthday party for ghosts, so ghosts would be honored and remembered too. One of the biggest holidays was (and still is) Chinese New Year.
Chinese New Year: Chinese New Year started thousands of years ago. It was a festival for remembering ancestors and for feasting. This festival is still observed today.
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On Chinese New Year Eve, the start of this 15 day celebration, parents encourage children to stay awake as long as possible, because an old ancient Chinese superstition said the longer children stayed awake on Chinese New Year Eve, the longer their parents would live.
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Festivals and Parades: For 15 days, there are festivals and parades. Musicians and clowns and dancers in the parades do funny things to make people laugh. It is a joyous celebration. Everybody makes beautiful lanterns from paper and glass and silk. The lanterns have all kinds of shapes like dragons and cars and fish and airplanes and houses and more. They are hung everywhere, along streets, in gardens, from houses, in shopping malls, ain food markets, and outside smaller shops everywhere. Children make paper lanterns at school. But they are not lit, not until the Festival of Lights.
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Yan Yat: The seventh day of the Chinese New Year is called Yan Yat, "Everybody's Birthday." People exchange gifts of "red envelopes" of lucky money.
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Festival of Lights: Chinese New Year ends with the Festival of Lights. On the last day of the 15 day celebration, when the sky gets dark, people parade with lanterns with candles in them. There is always a dragon in the parade. Some dragons are so long, as long as a passenger train, that it takes 50 men to carry it along. People also light lanterns at home and sit out and enjoy the moon. This festival is still celebrated today. The idea of the Lantern Festival has remained the same - to light the way to a safe and happy new year.
Meet the Kitchen God: The ancient Chinese kitchen god was a bit of tattletale. Each year, right before the new year, the kitchen god was suppose to report all the behavior of the household to his boss, the Jade Emperor. The ancient Chinese believed if you left sweets as offerings for the kitchen god on the kitchen hearth right before he gave his report, his report would be glowing! The Jade Emperor would reward the family's good behavior with good luck. Since the kitchen god could not eat these treats, the family could eat them after they were offered to the kitchen god.
The Legend of Nian. The ancient Chinese held celebrations to chase monsters away. Sometimes they prayed that monsters would go away on their own, but that rarely worked. It took a festival, a whole village, to solve a monster problem.
Click here to read the ancient story of Nian, a very bad monster who had a very bad day.