Red Arrangements

Chinese New Year is well over now, but I still want to share some things, so...

Traditionally, it's a time to gather with family, as well as a period of renewal. A feast on the eve of the new year, followed by a good old cleansing. The street market during the day would be completely packed with people looking to buy fresh ingredients for the giant meal they would be cooking. The atmosphere wound be festive and exciting. My brother-in-law would spend the whole afternoon cooking the evening meal, and there would be so much food that leftovers would last the whole week.

Usually my wife will be in Taiwan with family for this event (and sometimes I would go too), but this year it didn't quite work out. She really missed the home-town feeling of Chinese New Year. We had a little gathering of our own though, and tried to replicate the feel as much as possible.

We did go to Chinatown which was quite lively. Found a place that sells calligraphy stationary at the Eastern Bookstore. That day they had an event where calligraphers were taking requests, and we had this made:

something something family, safety, peace, excitement, good fortune... something something.... very nicely done. We put it on the door frame. In the spirit of the year of the Boar, we we're looking for a nice Boar themed thing to hang but couldn't find one we liked.

The planned event was shaping up to be quite magical. In the morning the plan was to accommodate our friends that had children, where we would start with a "cleansing ceremony" that involves singing bowls, some essential oil mix spray, and this Hawaiian therapy thing.

Then we set up an area for anyone to try calligraphy, which you'll see some later.

After that, make dumplings.

And at dinner time, the feast. Hot pot, as the simplest preparation.

But things like to veer off plan... The people with kids didn't come because one went off nap schedule and the other just didn't feel like it.

I spent all day with a friend making dumplings. Which was rather relaxing I suppose.

That's the filling.

and that's one round of raw dumplings. They already look so pretty enough to eat right? Eventually I think we must have made 6 plate-fulls of it.

...and here's what some of them look like when cooked into potstickers. They were yummy. If you see green in there it's because we also had some green dumpling skins (spinach, I guess).

We had a lot of time to kill before people came. Tried my hand at calligraphy too. One of these is mine:

Most people just showed up for dinner or even later, which I suppose is expected. My wife performed the "cleansing ceremony" on all guests as they came in, which was fun to watch. I like the sound of the singing bowl ringing. And walking them through a round of Hoʻoponopono.

At some point, someone that came to the party ate a raw dumpling, and that was pretty horrifying. (This person is fine, as far as I know).

The feast was good, just sitting around, chatting, drinking, I think someone started up a game of charades too. And someone brought two tubs of ice cream that is now taking space in the freezer since none of us eats ice cream (it's cold...).

All in all, a good day. Happy belated lunar new years to all!

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