Lunar New Year Celebrated At Cotter
Alice, Jennifer, and Abraham distribute coin envelopes to students
For one day Cotter replaced it’s royal blue and white for red and gold.
On Friday, January 31, Cotter kicked off the Chinese Lunar New Year with gifts, decorations, and an assembly. As students entered the building, they received a red envelope decorated with Chinese characters representing luck and wealth and containing fifty cents inside. The building was decorated with red and gold in honor of this holiday because red represents wealth, happiness, and good luck.
At the end of the day there was about an assembly to celebrate the Chinese Lunar New Year. Three students, Bo Chao (Alice) Xuan, Xi (Jennifer) Xuan, and Haotian (Abraham) Zhou, answered questions and educated the student body about this holiday. Mr. Carpenter asked them questions and went through a slide show depicting different elements of the holiday.
“We put together some ideas and a slideshow and Mr carpenter asked us questions that he had about the holiday. It was Abraham’s idea to hand out the coins,” said Alice Xuan.
” New Year is the most important holiday in China. Since we are in America we don’t have time to celebrate and or no one has a break from school , so we wanted to do something to recognize the event,” said Alice, “We were a little nervous at first when speaking to the whole school, but it felt nice to let people know about our culture.”
Through this celebration students and faculty learned that the Chinese Lunar New Year isn’t celebrated on January 1st because they follow a special calendar called the lunar cal
endar which results Chinese New Year to be celebrated on a different date each year.
They also learned that by following the Chinese animal Zodiac, that this year is the year of the horse, and that everyone was born into the year of the rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, rooster, dog, or pig.
“At the dorm, some people went out for dinner and other people got together and cooked for each other,” says Xuan, “My suggestion for next year is to give everyone a day off for Chinese new years!”
