When is the lunar new year, and what are traditions you've heard about to celebrate it?

Here ya go.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_New_Year

I was in Taiwan for Chinese New Year in 2010, lots and lots of fireworks and celebrating.

Lots of Shrimp Spring Rolls, I worked with a lady from Singapore that would make hundreds upon hundreds of them for Lunar New Year. Bring them into work and we would buy them in bags of twenty,

So, if you happen to be eating out in Chinatown don’t be startled with all the firecrackers going off in the streets.

We Americans are more used to fireworks around the Fourth of July rather than the middle of winter :) When I used to live in Philly, we would go down just for the special New Years dinners at various restaurants.

Plus if there’s a large enough Asian community near you watch out for the parades with the Lion dancers. Really cool.

I bought the coolest fireworks in Taiwan, they were crazy, everyone went to a park nearby to set them off. Fireworks night and day for over 2 weeks during chinese N.Y.
I really wished I could have bought some home with me but a no no, obviously, on the plane. I gave the rest of mine to a couple of french college kids on the Taipei Metro.

My daughter and her bf were about 23 at the time, they would have loved my crazy arsenal of contraband explosives from asia. haha

For anyone further interested in Lion Dancing, this link is for a program episode of “Craft in America” whivh recently aired on PBS in Dec. which features a float maker for the San Francisco Chinese New Year parade AND a team of young Asians who restore historic Lion Heads used by the dancers. It was such an interesting peek into a cultural practice dating back centuries.

I’ve been watching the whole Craft in America series each time it airs. It’s really fascinating. Enjoy.

(There are also segments on Kwanzaa and tile making in this episode also, so don’t think I have the wrong video posted :) The Chinese parade segments comprise the majority of the total episode.)
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https://youtu.be/zKY9SXCmnCc

We have a big Chinatown parade here and I’ve never been.

And there’s another Asian neighborhood with a smaller parade, too.

Big parade on Sunday the 14th, little parade on the 13th. I should make one of them, thank you for the reminder!

That’s the “holiday” I’ve been talking about. It varies every year, but this year it’s going to start tomorrow. Don’t feel bad about it because it’s strictly an Asian thing. We do very similar things to your Christmas: buy stuff, clean the house, put up trees… the days before New Year are insanely busy, but after that there will only be eating, visiting others and going out. Children specially love the holiday, not because of the long break, but also… you know, something called lucky money.

The Chinese lunar new year is not the only one. The Jewish and Islamic calendars are also lunar. I know from my upbringing that the Jewish new year is Rosh Hashanah, which occurs in autumn.

One difficulty with a lunar calendar is that the number of days in a lunar year is not the same as the number of days in a solar year. Lunar months are based on aligning to new moons, which don’t sync perfectly with movement of the earth around the sun. In the Islamic calendar this means that holidays will vary as to what season they are celebrated in. The Jewish and Chinese calendars add leap months to some years to keep the lunar year aligned with the solar year. This means that the Chinese new year always falls on around the same time each year but will vary slightly from one year to the next.

So sad, the big earthquake in Taiwan, a bad start to their celebrations.

Thanks everyone. I asked this question because I heard an interviewee on NPR referred to the lunar new year, but didn’t mention the Asian or Chinese New Year in the same breath. I thought it was something different – but it turns out it’s the same. I was interested, though, to learn that the Jewish and Islamic calendars are lunar. Thanks, @LostInParadise!