Manyu does not get overly excited about Christmas, and I’m lukewarm to Chinese New Year. As much as we appreciate each other’s cultures, our love of particular holidays remains tied to our individual childhoods. Clare is both her mother’s daughter and her dad’s little girl, so she gets excited about both.
Clare and her boyfriend Chase came to La Crosse last weekend for Chinese New Year, and we had a total of eleven people at our New Year’s dinner table. (New Year’s was on Wednesday, but we celebrated it on Saturday so Clare could be there.) There was Manyu and me, Clare and Chase, my brother-in-law’s family of four (an older daughter is back in Taiwan), and three people I’d never met before. A big part of Chinese New Year is the food. Manyu cooked for an entire week, and Clare and Chase brought an ice cooler of egg tarts and vegetarian dishes. I’d recently dropped the four pounds I’d gained over Thanksgiving and Christmas, but now I am starting over again.
A tradition of the New Year is to hand out red envelopes containing money to all of the kids in attendance. Manyu gave one to Chase. She explained to him that it would be the only one he’d ever get from her. He was already too old to receive New Year’s red envelopes, but because he was a white guy from Nebraska who’d never been a given a red envelope as a child, she was making a one-time exception.
With a room full of Taiwanese people in my house, I asked them why English-speaking media coverage about Chinese New Year was calling it the Year of the Wood Snake and not just the Year of the Snake. The question stumped them. To their knowledge, none of the Asian news outlets was calling it the Year of the Wood Snake, and they’d never heard the term before. They did say that wood is, along with fire, earth, water, and metal, one of the five “processes,” and 2025 might be both a snake year and a wood year. If it was a wood year, they thought it might be a good thing. Snakes are courageous, but also intimidating and tenacious. Wood is a soft element, so its influence might temper the snake’s aggressive tendencies.
Xīn nián kuài lè. (trans. “Happy New Year”).
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