“The Winter Solstice Festival is very important to the Chinese culture. It is celebrated around December 21, the shortest day of the year. This festival celebrates longer daylight, which means that there’s more positive energy. For this festival, families get together and eat tangyuan. Tangyuan are glutinous rice balls that represent reunion. It allows families to reunite.”
My informant learned the item when she grew up in Taiwan. It’s an important Chinese tradition that most people participate in. My mom has been celebrating the Winter Solstice Festival ever since she was a little kid, and now my family celebrates it every year.
My family celebrates the festival on December 21. We have a huge family reunion with my aunts and uncles. We go to a Chinese restaurant to eat a delicious dinner, while catching up on everybody’s life. After dinner, each family separates and goes home. At home, my mom cooks tangyuan for my whole family. Usually, she makes several stuffed tangyuan and many small plain ones.
My mom enjoys this celebration because she loves family get-togethers. With the busy lives that everyone leads now, my parents do not get to see their brothers and sisters often. This festival is a chance for everyone to reunite. This celebration is particularly important to my mom because of the fact that we always have a family reunion on this day. This day also allows my mom to sit down with my family while eating tangyuan.
I think that this festival is significant to Chinese culture and Chinese families. I agree with my mom, and I think that families really don’t have very much time to sit down and talk to each other. Even family dinners are becoming so rare in American families. Parents are always working and children have extracurricular activities and large amounts of homework that keep them from eating at a set time. Also, this festival shows Chinese values. Chinese people value positive things, so the fact that after the winter solstice is over and there will be days with longer daylight is relative to their beliefs.
‘My family’s religion is called the Bahai faith, and most persians celebrate what is called Nowruz, which is the Persian New Year, and that’s in the beginning of March. And what you do, it’s a big tradition where you set up these seven plates on a table to celebrate the new year, and it’s called Haft Sin. And the seven items you put on the dishes are sabzeh, which is wheat or barley or lentil, samanu, which is sweet pudding, senjed, dried fruit, sir, garlic, sib, apple slices, somaq, berries, and serkeh, which is vinegar and you put that in a cup. But with the sabzeh, what you do is, they’re usually lentils, and you put them on a dish, and then you put a damp towel over the dish, and then over a series of ten days the sprouts will grow, and it’s this fun thing that you can see every morning as they grow. And Haft is seven, and sin is the letter ‘s’, so it’s called the seven S’s.
Haft Sin is an integral part of Nowruz, the Persian New Year holiday that is celebrated on the vernal equinox. The celebration represents the new life that awaits them in the year to come, as well as the rejuvenation of nature around them. Each of the seven items laid out for Haft Sin has it’s own particular symbolic meaning. Sabzeh, the plate of grains that sprout represents purity, opulence, and good fortune, as well as rejuvenation and growth; samanu, which is sweet and a favorite of kids, represents fertility and bearing many children; senjed represents love; sir, the garlic, is the medicine for recovering from evil; the apple slices, or sib represent health and natural beauty; the color of the berries of the somaq symbolizes the sun at sunrise, awaiting a new day; and serkeh symbolizes age and patience, and wards off the bitterness that comes with old age. These seven items are very important because not only is seven a very mystical number in Iran, there is one item for every day of the week, and one item that represents every stage in the human life cycle.
Informant: “So for Sylvester, in every major city, and pretty much all of Germany, you are allowed to shoot fireworks at the turn of midnight. And this day is a holiday, but some shops are open like, until 6:00pm. And then people will go to their houses, or friend’s houses, or even parties. But usually first, the evening starts with a dinner. Like, not just with your close family, but it is with your friends too.”
Interviewer: “And why do they call New Years ‘Sylvester’?”
Informant: “I have no idea, I mean I never thought of it as ‘New Years’. It is just the name we gave it. I think it is some religious guy… Oh! And on Sylvester everyone always watches Dinner for One. It is one of these things where you have a certain tradition, and you don’t really know where it comes from but you grow up with. And Dinner for One is a common thing for Sylvester because the butler in the show keeps saying ‘same procedure as every year?’ So he is referring to the routine, and that some things don’t change even though the year changes. I don’t know, it’s just one of these traditions that you don’t know where they come from, but you grew up with them so you don’t really question them. So yeah.”
Analysis:
Much like in America, Germany celebrates New Years by partaking in special events such as the shooting of fireworks at midnight and spending time with friends and family. On New Years it is important to spend time with friends and family because it is a way of expressing to them that you appreciate and love them, and you want them to be in your life at the start of the new year. This indicates that you are wishing your relationship with them to extend into the new year, and many years afterwards. The shooting off of fireworks is a sign of celebration, much like it is in America. However a difference I noticed when I celebrated New Years with my informant was that in Germany people are allowed to fire the big fireworks, but where I am from in America only city workers are allowed to shoot off the big fireworks because it is considered too dangerous for other people to do. Even though firework regulations change based on where you are in America, the fact that there are not as many regulations on fireworks in Germany indicates that the German government probably trusts it’s people with the explosives more than the American government does with their people.
In Germany, ‘New Years’ is referred to as Sylvester. My informant was not sure as to why this is, which indicates that the tradition of calling ‘New Years’ ‘Sylvester’ comes from old, long forgotten beliefs. In my research I discovered that the term ‘Sylvester’ is of Isreali origin because that is what the Isreali people call the New Years celebration. Sylvester was the name of the ‘saint’ and Roman Pope who was in charge of the Catholic church during the 4th century. Pope Sylvester is best known for convincing Constantine to forbid Jews from living in Jerusalem. All Catholic ‘Saints’ are awarded the day Christians celebrate and pay tribute to that Saint’s memory, and December 31 is Saint Sylvester Day. Due to the anti-Semitic tone of this legend, perhaps one of the reasons why my informant was not aware of the true origin of Saint Sylvester Day was because Germany has been very careful to distance themselves from their negative history in WWII and the Holocaust.
The final Sylvester tradition my informant mentioned was watching Dinner for One every year. This english film is played every hour on television during Sylvester and it is very popular in Germany because as my informant pointed out, it reflects on the idea that even though things are changing there are some things in life that will always remain. Some people feel anxiety towards change, therefore I can understand how in this idea that there is “the same procedure every year” is reassuring to those fearful of change. The film is especially popular among the wealthier German class because there are jokes in the film that only the wealthy would understand, such as the knowledge of serving the right kind of alcoholic drink with the food. This comes from upper class dining beliefs that for example, port is an after dinner drink therefore it should be served with the final dish, fruit. The film is also in English, which is a language that only educated German people would understand.
My informant was born in 1992 Hamburg, Germany. She studied at USC from 2010-2011 before moving to Brussels, Belgium to study international policy planning for her undergraduate degree. She lives part time in Brussels, Belgium and part time in her hometown Hamburg, Germany.
A long time ago, 13 animals lived in harmony. The 13 animals were the rat, cat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog and pig. The king organized a race, telling the animals that they must compete in the race. In this race, the animals had to cross a fast flowing river and get to the other side to receive their prize, but there were only 12 prizes available. The rat and cat were really good friends, but were worried that they would not finish the race because they were both poor swimmers. The two came up with a plan. They went to the ox and admired the ox’s strength, asking if the ox would be kind enough to let them ride on its back across the river. The ox agreed. The race began and the ox quickly took the lead with the rat and cat sitting on his shoulders. When the ox neared the bank of the river, the rat pushed the cat into the river. The cat struggled to swim but was washed away by the currents. Then, the rat decided to jump off the shoulder of the ox, taking first place. The king gave the rat its reward, which was that the first year of the zodiac would be named after it. The ox received second place and got the second year of the zodiac named after him. Then the tiger crossed the bank and got the third year named after it. Then the rabbit appeared and got the fourth year named after it. Then the dragon appeared and got the fifth year named after it. Then the snake appeared and got the sixth year named after it. Then the horse appeared and got the seventh year named after it. Then the goat appeared and got the eighth year named after it. Then the monkey appeared and got the ninth year named after it. Then the rooster appeared and got the tenth year named after it. Then the dog appeared and got the eleventh year named after it. And then, in last place the pig appeared, slowly trudging along, and got the twelfth year named after it. Crawling out of the water, the cat appeared, but did not receive a prize. Since then, cats and rats have always been enemies. And that is how the animals of the Chinese Zodiac came to be.
My informant first heard this myth from his parents around Chinese New Year. That time of year lends itself to this story as it serves as an explanation for the ordering of the years in the Chinese Zodiac and is the basis for the personality profiles of people born in the different years.. This myth is fairly wide spread and has a number of different forms. Here I have included my informants favorite version, but there are others that include why the dragon. This myth emphasizes intelligence and cunning over brute strength, as the meek rat is ultimately triumphant. It also seems to condone betrayal, as the rat is rewarded despite his actions.
There was once a village that was terrorized by a monster at the same time every year. The monster targeted children. The townspeople could not defeat the monster and the monster would not leave them alone. One day, a young man with a red pouch went to battle the monster, but the monster ran from him. The man returned to the village, telling the townspeople that the monster was frightened by the color red. So, everyone in the village dressed their children in red. When the monster came to the village, it quickly fled, fearful of the color red. The villagers took the color red as a symbol of luck and gave the children red envelopes every year to ward away the monster and to bring good fortune to the child.
My informant has known this story as long as he can remember. His parents would tell it to he and his cousins around Chinese New Years. The monster described serves as a form of boogeyman, and the fact that the red envelopes given by the parents are needed to ward him away the monster allow for a form of black mail to make the children behave as the new year approaches, much as Santa does around Christmas time for Christians. It would be interesting to know if these traditions developed independently or if one inspired the other.
