This year, the GA community joyfully highlighted the importance of the Lunar New Year by celebrating this holiday with many festivities and activities, supporting other cultures and many traditions that surround this day.
Lunar New Year is celebrated by many countries all over the world. This year, GA had numerous activities to celebrate this holiday. Asian Culture Club (ACC) leaders, Riya Palkar ‘22 and Jason Wang ‘22, put together a multitude of festivities for the Upper School.
This year, Lunar New Year took place on Feb. 1, and the Upper School started the celebration off with a RED dress-down day. Red, in China, symbolizes luck, fortune, and happiness. The Upper School students and faculty did not disappoint in showing up in their red attire in honor of the holiday.
In addition to the dress-down day, ACC put together a Hi-Chews competition and distributed fortune cookies to every advisory. Hi-Chews are Japanese fruit candies that are very popular in East Asia. Fortune cookies are also associated heavily with Lunar New Year. Despite its origin not being from China, it has become a tradition to open fortune cookies on this holiday, as these cookies represent luck, fate, and wisdom.
Additionally, ACC decorated the entire Upper School with lanterns, balloons, and banners. Unfortunately, due to the snowstorm, decorations were delayed until after Lunar New Year. Still, many ACC members took to the halls of the Upper School and decorated the house lounges and hallways to portray a festive spirit.
When discussing the topic of this year’s decorations with Riya Palkar ‘22, she said, “we were super excited to be able to do that, as last year we still had some more covid protocols so we had a little less decor.” She continued on to say that she loved to see everyone in the club stay after school to decorate, “especially the underclassman.” Jessica Wang ‘25 was one of the freshmen who stayed after school to help decorate. She says that she “had a lot of fun” and it was “nice to see everyone putting together decorations.”
In addition to putting up decorations and planning activities for the Upper School, Palkar reflects on what she thought was nice about this year’s Lunar New Year celebration. She says, “it was nice to see everyone becoming more aware of the holiday, and I think having that in combination with Black History Month really allowed GA to see the traditions of different cultures and learn about our values a little more.” As Lunar New Year occurred on the same day Black History Month started, she mentions how it shows the GA community becoming much more inclusive.
Moreover, we have numerous students and faculty that celebrate Lunar New Year. The Lunar New Year is a very significant holiday for many countries all over the world, marking the start of a new year based on the lunisolar calendar.
Tsung Tsai, GA Upper School Chinese teacher, reminds us that “Asia has a lot of lands, so the New Year’s celebrations are very diverse, and there really isn’t the same thing that everybody does.” She herself is Taiwanese, and her own Lunar New Year traditions are unique to her family. Ms. Tsai mentions that it is tradition to light firecrackers and count down on New Year’s Eve, as well as having family over to celebrate. Adults will give children or the unemployed red envelopes, or Hong bao, which is lucky money. Furthermore, many families celebrate the new year with new clothes to symbolize a new start with fresh hopes.
Jessica Wang also shares her family’s traditions surrounding the holiday. She says that her family makes dumplings in which they put a small object, usually a coin, in the middle. The first one to find it wins.
Each family, inside and outside the GA community, has special traditions to celebrate the new year. With the celebrations of Lunar New Year in mind, Ms. Tsai said, “I feel GA has started to respect the Asian community more and more… before I came here, no one talked about Asian culture or Lunar New Year, there wasn’t even an announcement…now GA has started to celebrate seriously by producing a good program.”