Cuisine & Culture the Chinese Family Way
This Chinese New Year Candy ang pow lantern is more fanciful and beautiful than a simple plain Chinese lantern. It is like an upgrade to a more complicated looking lantern and it does not require any more materials than a simple lantern, except a pair of scissors. It also looks like a candy wrapper.
The Paper FX tool kit simplifies weaving and allows you to turn any scrap piece of paper into beautiful accessories, gifts and decorations in four simple steps! Tear it, crease it, weave it and make it!
Super Cute Origami is a brand new origami kit that will appeal to all ages! This super cute collection of easy origami crafts can be customized in endless ways. It comes with 10 delightfully adorable designs which you can very easily personalise them in thousands of ways. The possibilities are limitless!
In Chinese culture, fish is considered a lucky symbol as it is associated with surplus or abundance. Many people who practise feng shui will have exactly nine fishes in the tank or pond, not more and not less. The reason is number nine is the most auspicious number which symbolizes your wealth having a long life span. Even at Chinese New Year, we will have a dish of steamed fish as it represents long life. Through this Origami Fish & Other Sea Creatures kit, you can now create your very own feng shui fish craft!
We made Chinese New Year Drum! This coming 8th February 2016, we are welcoming the Year of the Monkey and saying goodbye to Year of the Goat/Sheep. The Monkey is the ninth animal out of 12 in the Chinese zodiac. Take a look at my previous post if you want to familiarise yourself with the Chinese zodiac, and check out how we used simple crafts to teach children about it.
As this coming year is the Year of the Monkey (猴), we are learning how to write “monkey” in Chinese at home. Also not forgetting learning a couple more Chinese New Year themed words like 福 (Happiness), 吉 (Lucky) and 春 (Spring).
Lunar New Year is also know as Chinese Spring Festival. It is a quite a long story as to why it is called Spring Festival but the short version is that it is mainly based on mainland Chinese ruling. Spring 春 is widely used on the Chinese New Year theme or Auspicious words on Festival Couplets (New Year’s wishes on pieces of red papers) like:
迎春接福 Yíng chún jiē fú – Greet the New Year and encounter happiness
春回大地 chūn huí dà dì – Spring has come back to the earth
