We had a pretty good Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) this year. We did not manage to clean the whole house ahead of time, as is the tradition, but Daniel did get his bedroom clean. We mostly celebrated on Sunday, which is Spring Festival eve. That is when much celebrating is done in China as well. Daniel enjoyed his day by watching the Spring Festival TV gala on the internet and making lots and lots of phone calls back to China. In the evening, we made homemade dumplings. (Thanks for posting your family's recipes, Jennifer!) I played fast and loose with the filling and it turned out delicious, if I do say so myself. The wrappers, though...lets just say this was my first time making them, and I haven't got the hang of rolling them out yet. So they were waaaay too thick. (Daniel said they tasted good, though.) I think part of my mistake is that I'm used to rolling out cookie dough, where you want to use as little flour as possible. So my little circles were sticky and hard to manage. But I realized (as I saw Daniel liberally dumping flour over his dough) that when the thing you are rolling out only consists of flour and water, it really doesn't matter how much flour you use. So maybe next time they will be better. The dumplings did, at least, stayed together when I boiled them. I didn't have the energy left to make any "dishes" to go with the dumplings, so it wasn't a real New Year feast, but at least we had the most important part! (In case anyone wonders what Esther is wearing in the first few pictures...it is her gymnastics leotard. I made her change clothes when we got to the rolling-out part, so that her leotard didn't get covered in flour. And yes, she is wearing yet a third outfit in the eating picture because the clothes she wore to roll out dumplings did indeed get covered in flour.)
We forgot to give the kids their red envelopes (of "lucky money") until the day after Spring Festival. Oops! I am also, I believe, supposed to be wearing red socks and underwear this year in honor of my zodiac year (I'm a dragon), but I don't own any red underwear and I keep forgetting to dig out my Christmas socks. :-)
The whole thing made Daniel kind of homesick. Being a Chinese kid celebrating Spring Festival in an American family for the first time is kind of like if an American teenager moved to China and discovered that Christmas there, instead of having lights everywhere, special music, special food, visits to relatives, school vacation, and loads of presents, consisted of a couple of gifts at home and one batch of misshapen cookies (because although his new mama really wanted to give him a taste of home, she didn't know how to make them right). Daniel knows that Christmas is our big holiday here, but he missed the fireworks and excitement of the New Year, he missed the special food and music, he missed the family he has spent Spring Festival with every year since he was six, and he especially missed the long school vacation. So while he did enjoy the things that we did, he also said several times that he wished he could go back to China for Spring Festival. And he was pretty grumpy about getting up and going to school on Monday. I do hope we will all get to celebrate Spring Festival in China together someday (Tim has a sabbatical coming up in four and a half years...), but in the meantime, we are happy to be starting out a new year with Daniel in our family. Go year of the dragon!!
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