Lunar New Year

When it falls

The first day of the first lunar month — the second new moon after the December solstice — which puts it between 21 January and 20 February. The public holiday runs a week and the festival fifteen days, to the Lantern Festival.

The Phala almanac gives the exact day for your own city; the lunar and solar rules above are what it computes from.

The story

The old story is Nián, a beast that came out of the mountains at the turn of the year to eat livestock and children, and was found to be afraid of three things: red, fire and loud noise. That is the whole visual language of the festival — red couplets on the doorframe, red envelopes, lanterns, firecrackers.

Each year carries one of twelve animals and one of five elements, so the pair repeats every sixty years. The animal is the first thing anyone asks about a birth year, and the cycle is the same one the calendar has counted in since the Han.

What the day actually is, though, is the journey. Chunyun, the travel season around it, moves several billion trips in forty days — the largest annual human migration there is — because the rule is that you go home.

How the day is kept

• Red couplets are pasted either side of the door and the character fú hung upside down, because "upside down" and "arrived" are the same sound.
• Red envelopes of money pass from married to unmarried and from old to young; the amount matters less than that the number is even and has no four in it.
• The first days are visits in a fixed order — the second day belongs to the wife's parents — and the house is not swept, so the new luck stays in.
• Korea keeps the same day as Seollal, with tteokguk soup that adds a year to your age, and Vietnam as Tết, sometimes a day apart because the calendar is computed in a different time zone.

More new years