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Guo Nian Hao

On Sunday, February 18, we will celebrate the Chinese New Year, the biggest feasting, well-wishing and merry-making season for the Chinese - in this country and elsewhere.

On Wednesday, a friend from Mexico wrote me saying: "This year, strangely, we're going to be featuring several notes about it in my newspaper."

As Chinese products continue to fill shelves everywhere the world, it's just as well the rest of the world knows more about the cultural traditions of China.

To the rest of the world, the Chinese Lunar New Year (according to the Lunar Calendar) is known as the Spring Festival. In Chinese parlance, it's simply Guo Nian.

"Spring Festival", by the way, is an apt translation. Festival, a time set aside for feasting (and other celebrations), is spot-on. Food used to dominate the Lunar New Year celebrations, for obvious reasons. Times were hard, if there's any time in a year that people get to feast and, if the harvests were good, eat their fill is during the New Year. Hence, the festive mood from all around.

But the Spring Festival fails to capture the other side of story for "Guo Nian", which is what I'm going to talk about here.

As more foreigners learn to speak Chinese, they'll want to learn about "Guo Nian" anyway, so that they can celebrate the Chinese holiday the Chinese way.

Literally "Guo Nian" means "Pass the Year". According to legend, the "Year" (pronounced Nian in Mandarin) is an animal, a man-eating and havoc-wrecking beast. He makes his lone visit at the year-end. That's the reason for the fireworks - people hope to drive the Nian beast away with the noise from all the firecrackers.