‪#‎chinesenewyear‬ ‪#‎新年快樂‬ ！！

‪#‎chinesenewyear‬ ‪#‎新年快樂‬ ！！

"This year is the Year of the Horse, which is said to bring prosperity and wealth. Chinese New Year is celebrated on the first day of the Chinese calendar, and this year it will fall on 31 January.
The doodle features an image of a girl on a rocking horse and a boy holding fire crackers and Chinese lanterns.
Celebrations usually begin on Chinese New Year's Eve, signalling the end of the Year of the Snake. The lunar calendar is based upon the cycles of the moon and has 12 animals, one to represent each year of the lunisolar cycle.
At Chinese New Year people traditionally wear red clothes and give children "lucky money" contained in red envelopes. The colour red symbolises fire to drive away bad luck.
To mark the holiday families typically reunite and gather at each other's homes to celebrate and eat together. It is also tradition for households to thoroughly cleanse the house to sweep away ill fortune and make way for good luck, to decorate windows and doors with red paper-cuts and to light firecrackers.
Festivities often continue until the Lantern Festival, held on the fifteenth day of the first lunar month. Red paper lanterns are hung across houses and in streets. The highlight of this festival is often considered to be the dragon dance. The dragon is typically made of silk, paper, and bambooand is held aloft as people take it through the streets.
The holiday is centuries old and is celebrated across mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and other Asian countries.
Those born in the Year of the Horse are believed to be cheerful, skillful with money, perceptive and witty. Famous people born in this year include actress Halle Berry, Rembrandt and singer Aretha Franklin."

Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/chinese-new-year-2014-celebrated-by-google-doodle-9093815.html

Here's what you need to know:

What is Chinese New Year?
New Year is one of China's oldest festivals. It marks the beginning of a new year and a new agricultural season, and is considered a time for loved ones to reunite and take part in traditions designed to bring good fortune for the next 12 months.
The noise and colour come from one of the legends associated with the celebrations - that of the beast Nian, a monster which would appear at the end of every year and attack people. Villagers worked out that loud noise, bright lights and the colour red kept Nian at bay, and so the seeds of Chinese New Year celebrations were sown.

Read more: http://www.theweek.co.uk/arts-life/57103/chinese-new-year-2014-year-horse-explained#ixzz2rqlNfpKX



Which animal represents 2014?

The Chinese year is linked directly to the Chinese Zodiac – a list of 12 animals representing different years and 2014 will be the year of the horse. It is believed that someone born in a particular year will share similar attributes to the animal with which that year is associated.

Read more: http://www.theweek.co.uk/arts-life/57103/chinese-new-year-2014-year-horse-explained#ixzz2rqlgY1yi

In China, the familiar Gregorian calendar is used for day-to-day life. But Chinese calendardates continue to be used to mark traditional holidays such as the new year and the fall moon festival. It’s also used astrologically to select favorable dates for weddings and other special events.
The Chinese calendar is a lunisolar calendar, in other words, a combination of solar and lunar calendars. It has a long history spanning several Chinese dynastic rules from as far back as the Shang Dynasty around fourteenth century B.C.. There are several different symbolic cycles within the calendar, used in Chinese astrology, that make it an intricate and complex measure of time.
A month in the Chinese calendar spans a single lunar cycle. The first day of the month begins during the new moon, when no sunlight falls on the lunar hemisphere that faces the Earth. A lunar cycle, on average, lasts 29.5 days, so a lunar month can last 29 or 30 days. Usually, there are 12 lunar months in a Chinese calendar year. In order to catch up with the solar calendar, which averages 365.25 days in a year, an extra month is added to the Chinese calendar every two or three years. As a result, Chinese New Year falls on different dates each year (in the Gregorian calendar) between January 21 and February 21.

Read more:  http://earthsky.org/human-world/chinese-new-year-2014-rings-in-year-of-the-horse