Happy New Year! 新年快乐!

新年快乐! 春节快乐!

Happy year of the Ox. It’s not quite the usual New Year, which includes visiting family, making dumplings, handing out red envelopes or going see a special program at your Mandarin immersion school. But it’s still a happy occasion.

And the glory of Chinese New Year (also known as the Spring Festival) is that it lasts for another eight days, so you’re not behind at all.

You can read about the various usual activities here.

It’s the year of the metal ox, actually, and you can read all about that here.

For most of China, New Year wouldn’t be New Year without watching the star-studded New Year Special that airs tonight. You can read about it and find it online here.

There are various rhymes for remembering all 12 signs of the Chinese zodiac, ask your child if they know any of them. For reasons I don’t understand, a common one online for memorizing them in English is linked to Red Lobster restaurants.

And a trick if you didn’t grow up in with them — you can usually figure out how old anyone is just by asking what year they were born in. If they’re year of the horse, they were either born in 1966, 1978, 1990 or 2002. I had a friend who once offhandedly said something about how old I was and I asked her how she knew. “You told me your zodiac sign, silly!” she answered.