The students in Mrs. Liang’s Mandarin class at Polk County Middle School recently celebrated the Chinese Spring Festival, what most people call the “Chinese New Year.”
This festival is to welcome spring, a season that bears new hopes. The students made spring ornaments and decorations for the school’s entrance. Most of the ornaments are red because red is the most popular color in China. The students cut paper into three-dimensional Chinese characters that mean “spring.” They folded the paper into a special pattern and then cut the characters out.
The final piece has four sides, representing a Chinese phrase that expresses the Chinese people’s wish that the four seasons of the year would be like spring, warm and full of hope.
Students also made red paper dragons because the year 2012 is the year of the dragon, according to the Chinese zodiac animal circle. The red paper with fish on it indicates abundance and surplus. Fish have always been important in new-year decorations and feasts. According to Liang, the Chinese phrase for “may there be surpluses every year” sounds the same as “may there be fish every year.”
On the pillars are the couplets written by Mandarin class students. These couplets are usually hung on doors or pillars. All of them convey people’s new year wishes and mean something good and lucky. The couplets mean “always be with good luck and fortune.”
– article submitted
by Carlann Scherping and Lianhong Liang