Spring Festival: Chinese New Year from Laba to Lantern Festival

Introduction

When the twelfth lunar month arrives, the Chinese sense of time shifts.

Cured meats drying in alleyways, supermarket shelves stacked high with festive goods, countdown timers on ticket-booking apps — everything points in the same direction: go home for the New Year.

The Spring Festival's place in Chinese life is difficult to capture in a few sentences. It is not simply a holiday. It is a month-long ritual arc that includes Laba, the Kitchen God festival, New Year's Eve, the New Year itself, the God of Wealth celebration, and the Lantern Festival. Each of these junctures has its own foods, customs, and taboos. If the year is a river, the Spring Festival is the grandest stretch of the voyage.

1. The Scope of Spring Festival: Laba to Lantern Festival

1.1 Not a day, but a season

The Spring Festival is often thought of as New Year's Eve through the first day of the new year. But traditionally, the "New Year period" runs from the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month (Laba) through the fifteenth day of the first lunar month (Lantern Festival) — roughly thirty-seven days.

This extended period has a clear structure:

Phase	Time	Core Activities	Mood
Preparation	Laba ~ Dec 23	Laba porridge, Kitchen God ritual, spring cleaning	Busy and expectant
Sprint	Dec 24 ~ New Year's Eve	Shopping, couplets, cooking festive dishes	Tense and excited
Climax	New Year's Eve ~ Jan 5	Reunion dinner, staying up, greetings, welcoming the God of Wealth	Grand and celebratory
Wind-down	Jan 6 ~ Lantern Festival	Visiting relatives and friends, lantern-viewing, eating yuanxiao	Relaxed and joyful

This stretched timeline gives the Spring Festival a distinctive rhythm. It is not an explosion of celebration, but a carefully paced sequence of rituals.

2. The Countdown: Laba to New Year's Eve

2.1 Laba: the year's first knock

Laba is the beginning of the New Year period — and its gentlest chapter.

The eighth day of the twelfth month is the Laba festival. A proverb says: when the Laba drum sounds, spring grass grows.

— Jing-Chu Sui Shi Ji

Laba's signature is a bowl of Laba porridge — made from mixed grains, beans, and dried fruits. It is not simply food; it is a symbol of "gathering all things" at year's end. According to The Eastern Capital: A Dream of Splendor, temples in Kaifeng would distribute the porridge to citizens on Laba — a tradition that continues today.

Once Laba passes, the footsteps of the New Year are unmistakable.

2.2 The Little New Year: sending the Kitchen God

On the twenty-third or twenty-fourth of the twelfth month (northern and southern China differ by a day), families observe the "Little New Year." Its central ritual is sending the Kitchen God — the deity who has watched over the household all year — up to heaven to report on the family's conduct.

Families place malt sugar on the stove, hoping to "stick the Kitchen God's mouth shut" so he will "speak only good words in heaven, and bring peace back to the household."

This custom reveals a wonderfully human quality in Chinese folk religion: the relationship between gods and people is not one of pure awe, but of negotiation and even gentle manipulation.

2.3 Spring cleaning and shopping

After the Little New Year, every household undertakes a thorough cleaning — saochen, literally "sweeping away the dust." The word chen (dust) is a homophone for chen (stale, old). Sweeping the dust is sweeping away the bad luck of the old year, making space for the good fortune of the new.

Meanwhile, the New Year markets reach their peak. Couplets, New Year paintings, fireworks, dried fruits and candies, new clothes — every item is part of the preparations for the coming ritual.

3. New Year's Eve: The Most Important Meal of the Year

3.1 The reunion dinner

New Year's Eve is the peak of Chinese family ritual.

The reunion dinner is not just a meal. It is the endpoint of all separations over the past year. Those who work away from home, married daughters, children studying abroad — all must try to return to their parents' table. For a Chinese person to spend New Year's Eve far from home is a loneliness unlike any other.

A typical New Year's Eve menu carries symbolic meanings:

• Fish — "abundance year after year" (the word for fish, yu, sounds like "surplus")
• Dumplings — shaped like ancient silver ingots, symbolizing wealth
• Rice cake (niangao) — "rising higher each year"
• Chicken — "good luck and fortune"

3.2 Staying up and red envelopes

The family stays up together through midnight, with all lights on. Elders give children "lucky money" (yasuiquian) — originally coins strung on colored thread, used to ward off evil spirits. The word sui (year) sounds like sui (evil spirit); "pressing down on sui" means suppressing evil and protecting children.

3.3 Firecrackers

At midnight, the sound of firecrackers fills the air across cities and villages. Legend says the monster Nian fears loud noises, bright red, and fire — which is also why red couplets and firecrackers go together. Many cities have banned fireworks today, but electric firecrackers and recorded sound effects continue the tradition. The form changes, but the psychological need to drive away evil and welcome the new remains.

4. The First Seven Days of the New Year

4.1 Day 1: New Year greetings and auspicious beginnings

The first day of the new year. People put on new clothes and visit relatives and neighbors. The traditional order is: first pay respects to elders, then to peers, then to neighbors.

The first day also carries a long list of taboos: no sweeping (it sweeps away wealth), no pouring water (water symbolizes money), no using knives or scissors (to avoid conflict). Few observe these rules strictly today, but they reflect a shared psychology — at the start of a new year, every act should invite good fortune.

4.2 Days 2–4: visiting, ancestors, and welcoming the Kitchen God

• Day 2: Married daughters return to their birth families
• Day 3: Some regions hold ancestral rites or "sweep away poverty"
• Day 4: Welcoming the Kitchen God back; preparations to receive the God of Wealth

4.3 Day 5: Breaking the taboos and welcoming the God of Wealth

The fifth day is called Powu — "breaking the fifth." It means the taboos observed from day one to day four can now be "broken." Day 5 is also the day to welcome the God of Wealth. Businesses reopen on this day, setting off firecrackers to pray for a prosperous year ahead.

5. Lantern Festival: The Grand Finale

The fifteenth day of the first lunar month, the Lantern Festival, is both the finale of the New Year and its most spectacular chapter.

5.1 Lanterns and riddles

Lanterns are the visual heart of the festival. From imperial palaces to village markets, lantern fairs burn through the night.

The mountain of lanterns rises with colored decorations, gold and jade reflecting each other, brocade and embroidery interweaving.

— The Eastern Capital: A Dream of Splendor, 'First Month'

Riddles are often hung on the lanterns. Guessing them is a form of intellectual entertainment. Lantern-viewing, riddle-solving, dragon and lion dances — the Lantern Festival is the most vibrant, sleepless night of the Chinese year.

5.2 Ancient China's carnival

During the Song dynasty, the curfew was lifted for the Lantern Festival. Men and women of all ages could freely walk the streets. Women who were normally confined to the inner quarters could go out to see the lanterns on this one night. The Lantern Festival was therefore ancient China's closest equivalent to a carnival — boundaries of class, gender, and age were temporarily dissolved in the lantern light.

5.3 The north-south debate

Northern China eats yuanxiao; southern China eats tangyuan. The techniques differ — yuanxiao is made by rolling, tangyuan by wrapping — but the shape is the same, and the meaning is the same: roundness and completeness, family reunion. A bowl of hot yuanxiao or tangyuan brings the curtain down on the Spring Festival.

6. The Spring Festival in Modern Times

6.1 Chunyun: the world's largest human migration

Every year, in the roughly forty days before and after the Spring Festival, China experiences the largest periodic human migration on the planet — chunyun, or spring transport. Hundreds of millions of people move from cities back to their hometowns, then return after the holiday.

Chunyun is a unique sociological phenomenon. It proves the irreplaceable weight of "going home for the New Year" in the Chinese mindset. No matter how hard tickets are to get, how far the journey, or how crowded the trains — going home is not negotiable.

6.2 Is the flavor fading?

A question that arises every year: is the flavor of the New Year fading?

Many external forms have indeed changed:

• Fireworks are restricted, diminishing the soundscape of memory
• Greetings have moved from door-to-door visits to WeChat messages, reducing face-to-face contact
• The reunion dinner has moved from home to restaurants, losing the shared process of preparation

But the core of the Spring Festival — reunion — has never changed. The chunyun crowds have not shrunk. The anxiety of booking tickets has not lessened. The "reunion dinner photo contest" on social media grows more vibrant each year. The forms evolve, but the center holds.

Sources

• Jing-Chu Sui Shi Ji, Zong Lin, c. 6th century
• The Eastern Capital: A Dream of Splendor (Dongjing Meng Hua Lu), Meng Yuanlao, Southern Song
• Dijing Jingwu Lue, Liu Tong and Yu Yizheng, late Ming
• Yanjing Sui Shi Ji, Fucha Dunchong, late Qing
• Wulin Old Matters (Wulin Jiushi), Zhou Mi, Southern Song