The Spring Festival is the most important festival for the Chinese people and is when all family members get together, just like Christmas in the West.

    Right before the festival sets in, people are already busy grocery shopping, making new clothes, paying tribute to the Kitchen God and ancestors, preparing the family reunion banquet, pasting New Year couplets on gateposts or door panels, and pinning up New Year paintings on walls. During the festival, they visit each other and exchange New Year's greetings. Firecrackers are let off to liven up the atmosphere. A lot of dining and wining takes place during the festival, and every family make and eat New Year's cakes, dumplings and sweet dumplings. There are dragon, lion, and Yangge dances and lantern shows in both urban and rural areas, as merry-makers bid farewell to old year and wish for a good beginning in the new year, exorcise evil spirits and pestilence, and pray for good harvests and good luck in the new year. 

    During Spring Festival, many families decorate the window panes of their houses with pleasant-looking paper cuts portraying Chinese opera characters, flowers, birds, insects and fish. 

    New Year couplets, written on strips of red paper, are a major part of the Chinese Spring Festival custom. On the lunar New Year's Eve, families in urban and rural areas alike make it a point to grace their gate posts or door panels with couplets composed of two sentences which match each other in sound and sense to express their cherished wishes.  

Spring Festival Party

    New Year's paintings are a branch of Chinese folk art which draws inspirations from such things as bumper harvests, prosperity, landscape, flowers and birds, buffaloes, and babies. During the festival, the Chinese love to pin up a few New Year's paintings on their living room walls to bid farewell to the old year and greet the new.