The resident students at Lincoln Academy in Newcastle will celebrate the most important holiday in China at school this week.
Lunar New Year falls on Friday, Jan. 31 this year.
The resident students will give a multimedia presentation about Lunar New Year in different cultures at the school assembly Jan. 31. The school will also mark the holiday with festive decorations and a special meal.
Lunar New Year “is the most significant festival” in China, as important as Christmas in the U.S., said Lincoln Academy senior Cheng Chen, 18, of Kunming, China.
“In recent years, we do celebrate Christmas in China,” Chen said, but Lunar New Year remains, without question, the more important celebration.
Families visit their relatives, and parents and relatives give children gifts of “lucky money” in red envelopes, Cheng Chen said.
China also celebrates the holiday with fireworks.
Senior Jiayao Chen, 19, of Zhejiang, China, explained the tradition. According to legend, a fearsome creature, Nian, would show up around the holiday to hunt, kill and eat the people of China.
Desperate to scare the beast away, the Chinese invented gunpowder and set off fireworks.
“Later on, people just got used to having fireworks,” said Kai Bai, a 17-year-old senior from Chengdu.
The holiday, also known as Spring Festival, lasts 15 days in China, and students enjoy an entire month of school vacation.
Everybody cleans their home and finishes their chores before the new year. The goal is to avoid work on the first day of the year, because if you work, it signifies a year of very hard work ahead, according to Bai.
The food is also part of the tradition, especially dumplings.
“We usually make dumplings the night before the new year,” Jiayao Chen said.
A group of resident students, with help from a few local students, were at work in the dining commons Jan. 28 to prep enough pork dumplings for the entire student body to eat at lunch the next day.
The Lunar New Year “is a really important cultural celebration for the students,” Lincoln Academy Director of Resident Life Ken Stevenson said.
The resident student council is behind the efforts to decorate the school and prepare the traditional meal, Stevenson said, and all resident students sign up for a task. The result is an excellent example of student leadership, he said.
The holiday also provides “a great opportunity to educate the rest of the school about a tradition that matters to them,” he said.
For the students from China, the festivities bring a little bit of home to Maine.
“It’s really fun, because all of us are from the same country and we have the same traditions around the new year,” said Nancy Tong, a 17-year-old senior from Zhejiang.
