The informant is my grandmother from Taiwan, her hobbies are going to church and cooking. She says because Chinese tradition is very custom and done in certain ways it is weird to “stray” off on doing certain traditions. However, our family has done many of the same traditions, except starting from my great-grandparents time (4 generations), we had done some of these Lunar New Year traditions differently.

Informant:

We also eat a whole chicken but cannot eat head, legs, butt. We leave the leftovers to the 5th day, this means keeping your leftovers like your money.

Day 1 – eat only vegetarian for breakfast, a tradition that is still practiced in our family, but do not know the reason for it. Leftover rice is always made into dry rice, making into porridge will bring about rain. For breakfast, we have to eat boiled spinach. When boiling it, we put the whole spinach piece in as a symbol of living longer. 羅波糕 (Ruo Buo Gao) – In the Taiwanese dialect it means being “lucky winning lottery”. This is radish cake that we eat every Lunar New Year, specifically on the first day.

A lot of the traditions are practiced still, but in some cases, the meanings were lost. Although that may be the case, our family still blindly continued the rituals. Our family mainly continues to do many of the traditional rituals, but if it is too complicated or annoying we would rather change it to accommodate our preferences. This was interesting to hear because I had never asked or understood what doing all these actions implied, because I was rarely in Taiwan to celebrate lunar new year, I had no idea what or why my family would do such specific things.