The Stories of our Daily Life (6) New Year Preparations

John and Shirley, both of them were helping each other to make some home cooked New Year cookies. The Love letter cookie, the bee hive cookie, the arrow shoot chips, the special and traditional glutinous rice pancake, the traditional fried rice biscuit, these  were use to be homemade cookies by each and every home.  Hypermarkets were having plenty of these cookies for sale nowadays. John preferred to have them done homemade.

New Year around the corner, last Sunday for the New Year, early in the morning, John was excited as Shirley and he were planning to do the homemade New Year cookies. He brought all those cooking and baking utensils and placed them in front of their house, the car porch.  He brought out the charcoals; he brought out the cookies ingredients, started the fire and waiting for Shirley.

Neighbors teased John “John, making cake?”  John looked at them and smiled and they laughed. [Do read my other blog, The Morning Business, there were something about making cake]

Shirley was doing the baking and cooking; John was doing the packing and eating! Shirley padded lightly and pushed John’s hand away, indicating not to eat some more. “Please, John do not create a situation that we have no cookies for the New Year”

They lived in the housing estate where they owned the house. The housing estate was not a high end housing estate. It was considered as middle and upper class of housing estate, when it was newly completed. The area was quite a nice place to live on then.

Those newly moved in, either they had bought the house or rented. They made extensions illegally and the way they did the extensions, it looked like a village house. Some of them even treated the car porch in front of the house as a kitchen, a toilet, a hall, a dining hall, they cooked there, they ate there and may be one of these days, and they would sleep there as well.

As the old sayings, we could not fight against them, we joined them.  John did the cooking and baking in the car porch! It was not really joining them! John did the cooking only once a year!

John was brought up in one of the villages, houses were wooden built. A few days before New Year, every house, each and everyone, starting to cook and bake New Years cookies, in front of their houses, at the side of the houses or back yards. It was a scene that was created, a feel of full of joys, warmness, loves and cares to each other, what you had that was what I had.

House cleanings and New Year decorations, John and Shirley, they were still maintaining the traditions. It was a good tradition. It was also another good tradition; normal days no one was willing to thoroughly clean their houses! New Year times of cleaning, it was a real cleaning and clearing, one would have dug everything, dirt hide underneath, corners, crack walls and behind all cupboards, the paintings on the walls and many more. Old things had to go, as per the old sayings, the olds not going, the news (new thing) not coming.

New Year eve, annual dinner was one of the best traditions, it was a tradition for sons and their families only. Married daughters had to attend their husbands’ annual dinners. The first day of New Year belonged to the married daughters. They would go to their parents’ house together with their husbands and children.

John and Shirley would uphold the Chinese New Year traditions that were passed from their parents. Their parents passed on the traditions from China as they came from China and brought along with them. Some would regard that this was a religion traditions, John would prefer to have a belief that this was a tradition, and carried on from generation to generation, indicating some long lost stories behind each and every event before and after the New Year. Those events were they long lost true stories and became legends? It would be a historian’s jobs to find out.

Next Topic (7) the Potluck

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