Happy Chinese New Year!

This year we really prepped Elina for Chinese New Year. We let her watch the Chinese New Year episode of Kai-Lan almost every day and we had her practice Chinese New Year phrases. We did a few Chinese New Year crafts, like making firecrackers out of toilet paper rolls and lanterns out of construction paper. I even brought out old red envelopes so she could hand them out to her dolls and stuffed animals. She was SO ready for Chinese New Year.

The day before Chinese New Year, we had a big dinner with family and friends. We dressed Elina and Eli up in all sorts of Chinese outfits. Well, mainly Elina. I didn't realize we had so many Chinese outfits lying around the house. Elina had a photo shoot with all her cute outfits on.


J even put on some traditional Chinese music and had Elina dance to it. It was hilarious!




During dinner we handed out red envelopes and Elina said all the right things to get her many, many envelopes. We also had my birthday cake after dinner, so Elina got to stay up really late that night.

When my parents come to town we usually play mahjong every night, but we use chips. For Chinese New Year, you have to play with real cash. We played every night until really late. (Of course when it was time to wake up in the morning with the kids, my parents would be nowhere in sight. Figures.) Luckily, to make up for our lack of sleep, I won the most money for the week!--$308! My parents say that this means I'll have good fortune and luck this year. Woo-hoo!

Since Chinese New Year was on a Monday this year, the local Asian Festival just took place this past Saturday. We decided to go so that Elina could at least see the lion dance. It was really really fun. There were TONS of people though. My sister, A, used to live in San Antonio and she said that the people here love their festivals. I mean, LOVE. There's a festival for everything. Needless to say, everyone was at this thing. First we listened to an Asian choir sing some Chinese folk songs. Boy, was that scary. Then we listened to a Chinese orchestra play 2 songs. After that we decided to head out back to get some food. The food stands were packed. There was a stand that had bubble drinks and it was a madhouse. There was no visible line--just a mob of people in front of this stand. I saw one worker hold up a drink and say, "I have a taro one....taro?" And this one guy in the mob raised his hand with payment in his hand and yelled, "I'll take it!" Like I said, it was just chaos. So we just started standing in different lines that had less people and ordered as much as we could possibly carry. We ended up with a few bowls of fried rice, some lo-mein, teriyaki chicken, egg rolls, fried bananas, and chicken skewers. We sat at a picnic table and started eating voraciously because we were so hungry. A said it looked like we hadn't eaten in years. The stands had run out of forks, so in order to eat the noodles, my mom actually used 2 of the skewers as chopsticks to pick up the food. It was hilarious because we were just so classy.

After we devoured our "delicious" food, we walked around to check out all the vendors. People were selling a bunch of Asian knickknacks. We actually bought some stuff for Elina--a small umbrella, a fan, and a lantern. It was really inexpensive. A said next year she'll bring stuff over from Taiwan and sell it at this festival to make lots of money. It was so weird how crazy people were going over this stuff.

We ended our trip to the festival by watching some Chinese dances and the lion dance. We saw the plate dance, the fan dance, and a ribbon dance. All these dances brought back old memories of Columbia when I used to participate in things like this. I did a number of Chinese dances for a few Asian associations back in the day--an umbrella dance, a fan dance, and a teacup dance (which earned me the nickname Teacup Girl for quite some time). I know it sounds like a lot of dances, but when I was in college, if you even performed in 1 dance they would suck you in to doing all the other cultural dances! The dances at this Asian Festival were average, but entertaining enough (I can judge because I'm an ex-cultural dancer). But the lion dance was surprisingly good. It was longer than I expected and there were so many different lions. Elina sat up front and really enjoyed herself. She even borrowed A's camera and took lots of pictures. At the end she fed the lions money as well. She had a blast. Honestly, we all did. Despite the crowds, we had a wonderful time.

If we stay around here long enough, we're thinking of putting Elina into the San Antonio Lion Dance Association. Maybe she could be a short lion.

Happy New Year to everyone! We wish you good luck and happiness during this year of the ox.