Happy (Chinese) New Year!

Tomorrow, February 7th, 2008 is the first day of the year of the rat, according to the Chinese lunar calender. Tonight, New Year’s Eve, families will gather all over China for the biggest holiday season. Fireworks will light up the sky all through the night and continuing for the rest of the week. Families will enjoy a big dinner together and watch special TV shows with China’s top performers. In some ways, the Chinese Spring Festival can be compared to the Christmas season in predominantly Christian countries, as it is a real family holiday. The Spring Festival ends two weeks later (this year on February 21) with the Lantern Festival.

For some people, this will be the only time in the year that they can get together with their families, so the major snow storms which have hit China in the past few weeks have brought major disruptions to holiday travel. This travel season is refered to as Chunyun, the largest human migration. More trips are taken in mainland China at this time than the total population.

China is not the only country which celebrates two New Year’s. Both the Jewish and the Islamic religions keep their own calenders and celebrate New Year’s at different times. (Other calendars are used in Iran, Ethiopia and Armenia, just to name a few.) But for most purposes, the Gregorian calendar (sometimes refered to mistakenly as the Julian calendar) with 365 days is observed throughout the world. (I am still looking for exceptions! Do you know of any countries in the world where meetings or train and bus schedules are not based on the Gregorian calendar? Do share!)

I asked my colleague in China what it is like to have two New Year’s celebrations every year. She told me that January 1st is a one-day holiday in China and that some people go out on New Year’s Eve and have parties especially at the main squares of each city. But the real holiday is clearly the traditional New Year.

Business folks are advised that many companies in China are in “holiday mode” a few weeks before and after New Year’s day. The rule of thumb is easy to remember – if you can’t reach anybody in China in January or February, they are probably celebrating Spring Festival.

Image from www.ipl.com.