The first three days of the New Year are also important for Chinese people.
Everybody dresses up on New Year Day. They first extend greetings to their parents. Then each child will get money as a New Year gift, wrapped up in red paper. This is called "red pocket".
People in northern China will eat jiaozi, or dumplings, for breakfast, as they think "jiaozi" in sound means "bidding farewell to the old and ushering in the new". Also, the shape of the dumpling is like gold ingot from ancient China. So people eat them and wish for money and treasure. While southern Chinese eat niangao (New Year cake made of glutinous rice flour) on this occasion, because as a homophone, niangao means "higher and higher, one year after another."
The first several days after the Spring Festival are also a good time for relatives, friends, and classmates as well as colleagues to exchange greetings, gifts and chat leisurely in China. Moreover, they may go Temple Fair not only to eat traditional Chinese food but also purchase some Chinese local specialty.
Burning fireworks is the most typical custom on the Spring Festival. And there is a legend about it. Traced back to thousands of years ago, there was a ferocious monster called "nian". It lived deep at the bottom of the sea all the year round and climbed up to the shore only on New Year's Eve to devour the cattle and kill people's lives. Villagers were afraid of it so much that they always escaped from their homes on that day and couldn't enjoy New Year. One day a man thought of an idea that he burnt a pile of bamboo, the exploding sound of which scared the monster "nian" so much and drove it away and it dared not come back again. From then on, people began to burn fireworks on the Spring Festival Eve and this turned to be a kind of entertainment.
Besides, a series of other activities such as lion dancing, dragon lantern dancing and lantern festivals will also be held for days. The lively atmosphere not only fills every household, but permeates to streets and lanes. The Spring Festival then comes to an end when the Lantern Festival is finished.
(Materials from chinaculture.org)
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Producer: Shen Min