Chinese New Year: The Year of the Dragon, 2012

Our Chinese New Year's celebration this year was very simple and economical.

 We completed little lapbooks about Chinese New Year's...

 and put up our dragon friend (after all, it is his year!)...

 and ate a Chinese dinner.

 Take-out makes this meal easy.

 After dinner we painted some hanging lanterns that we found in the wedding section of the dollar store.

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With the addition of batteries, they light up, and were quite beautiful hanging from the ceiling.

 They opened their simple red envelopes...

and found a new dollar coin.
Happy Chinese New Year 2012!

Want to See Our Past Chinese New Year's Celebrations:

Chinese New Year: The Year of the Rabbit (2011)

Felt Fortune Cookies (2010 The Year of the Tiger)

Chinese New Year: Year of the Ox (2009)

Last Day of Chinese New Year: Lantern Festival (2009)

Chinese New Year (2008) (The Year of the Rat)

Chinese New Year 2011: The Year of the Rabbit

This afternoon we had a great time decorating for our Chinese New Year's Dinner.

I had bought red packets of coins with Chinese symbols on one side and the English equivalent on the other side.

I made rubbings of the Chinese characters side of the six coins...

and stuffed them into our felt fortune cookies.

By evening we had decorated the table.

Katie made origami rabbits and we sprinkled around the table Chinese coins.

Katie made firecracker strings from some firecracker shaped containers that held candy to hang for decorations.

We made some flower blossom tea.

We practiced using chopsticks. This is the first time the little boys had used their adult chopstick sets they got for Christmas. They are used to the kind which are attached together.

These are the candies from the firecracker shaped containers.

When we gave out the felt fortune cookies, they had to search through the coins in the red packets to be able to read their fortunes.

This character means "longevity."

We cleared the table and began our craft...painting fans.

In addition to fortune cookies (edible this time), we had rabbit shaped cookies for the year of the rabbit.

Gung hay fat choy!

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