The Chinese, like most of the rest of the peoples of the world, have a mid-winter celebration. Such festivals undoubtedly pre-date the Neolithic. There’s substantial evidence that most social groups or cultures went into a panic every winter over whether the sun would return to its summer intensity. People feared that the nights would continue to grow longer and colder and life would end for their little group. (A reasonable concern when you’re dodging glaciers in the middle of an ice-age wrapped in tree bark.)
This dilemma was apparently attributed to the notion that the tribe or a tribal member had displeased one of the local deities thus incurring its wrath in the form of a nasty winter. In an attempt to stave off a frigid, starving fate or enslavement by some tribe who hadn’t been abandoned by their particular godling, the shamans (shamen?), whose job it was to get the locals ‘off the hook’, would do their shamanistic ‘thang’: a personal ritual typically involving a sacrificial offering of flesh to the offended deity.
Surprise, surprise! These rituals always worked and the cycle of spring to summer to fall resumed unabated. (Hooray!) As timing is everything, even in the shaman business, these rituals were normally conducted on or close to the winter solstice: the longest night of the year. The days grow longer and the nights shorter after this date each year. The worst was over. Call it coincidence. The god was placated, the people partied heartily in their finest tree-bark couture and the shaman was awarded his bonus.
He got to live.
(One may speculate on how much of the annual panic was exacerbated by the shaman in order to aggrandize him/herself, thus securing their place in the social milieu and obligating the group to toss an extra bit of gristle in their broth.)
According to the Julian/Gregorian calendar, based as it is on the orbit of the earth around the sun, (Thank you, Mr Kopernik.) the winter solstice is the night of December 20/21. Consequently, the winter celebrations of Christmas, Chanukah, the Saturnalia, Kwanzaa and after-Christmas sales are held towards the end of December. But not the Chinese New Year celebration. Not CNY.
Unlike most of the rest of the world, the Chinese still base their social calendar on the orbit of the moon around the earth and the cycle of the phases of the moon. (Some psychotic god-emperor probably had their own version of Mr Kopernik drowned for insubordination in a vat of soy sauce. Don’t quote me on that.) As a result, the Chinese mid-winter festival, the Chinese Lunar New Year, a five-day period of celebration -and a rather manic attempt at relaxation - takes place sometime between the end of January and beginning of March depending on all manner of convoluted calendrical finagling by the current shaman-esque types.
It might come as a surprise that, as important as this holiday is in Chinese culture, no member of the general public seems to know when the CNY will be from year to year. It’s as if when asked when Christmas will be next year, the average North American would shrug, grin and openly admit to ignorance of more than a vague approximation. (Even after 19 years, this sort of thing makes me want to tear what little hair I have left. It's the bloody Lunar New Year, fer chrissake! It's based on an astronomic cycle; 28 days. Sheesss! Paleolithic humans were more aware of their world. It's enough to break a lesser man.)
I won’t bore you with the myriad insipid, preposterous acts of superstition traditionally practiced by the Chinese and meant to lure good fortune their way. You can read about them in any two-bit guide book. It’s all malarkey anyway. No more credence can be given to the efficacy of eating tangerines to the prospects of prosperity, for example, than can be rationally lent to the proposition that those ancient shamans/men actually induced the return of spring and summer by carving on their own body parts under the full moon on an empty stomach. What I’d rather bore you with is what I have observed the Chinese do for a good time during this, their most important holiday period.
First and foremost, the Chinese Lunar New Year is a time when all the members of the immediate family reunite. (Think of it as a combination Thanksgiving Day, Christmas and New Year’s without Jesus of Nazareth, the Pilgrims, Santa, football or Dick Clark.) Chinese all over the world are obliged by thousands of years of tradition and Confucian guilt to return to their hometowns. Over the river and through the woods and hell ‘n’ high water to grandma’s house they go. (That’s the paternal grandmother/father, of course. The wives must wait until the second day of the New Year to visit the distaff relatives.) Three, four, even five generations gather to eat, gamble, patch up disputes, eat, pay debts, take excursions, eat and generally function as a unit while eating or waiting to eat.
As every Chinese is making what amounts to a filial ‘hajj’ to the home of their parents and grandparents, it’s the worst possible time to travel. Every mode of conveyance is over-booked, over-priced and overwhelmed. Every year, folks queue up for days to purchase an SRO ticket for an hour’s train ride. Here in Taiwan, even with the best, most flexible scheduling, a 40-minute car trip might take hours due to a nearly nation-wide grid-lock in the run-up to the Eve of CNY. The effects of a staggering increase in vehicular traffic are compounded by the fact that all bets are off regarding traffic laws, especially at night and particularly on the eve of CNY. The sole reason for there not being traffic-related deaths in the thousands is that very little is traveling faster than a Tibetan penitent doing ring-a-round-the-lamasery.
The third year I was here, I accompanied a Chinese friend to his relatives’ gathering in southern Taiwan. It was ‘Planes, Trains and Automobiles’ with two buses and a two-stroke scooter thrown in. We left on the eve of CNY eve. The worst possible time to embark on CNY associated travel. By the time we arrived at his grandmother’s rustic brick and tile farmstead set way-the-hell-and-gone up in the mountains, the blue-speckled Moldavian tern had been taken off the endangered species list. You know what they say about one good tern… (insert groan here).
