Just my luck!

Happy Chinese New Year everyone. At least I think. It supposedly starts January 26, but we chose to celebrate it today (I'm not real savvy on the whole lunar calendar thing). Not that we've ever celebrated it before, but the thought of not having to cook dinner appealed to me, so we got some Chinese take-out, put up a few lanterns and hi-cha, Chinese New Year!!

Don't they look as excited as I am?

Jacob's penguin out of "Qi-Qiao Ban" or "seven clever pieces" or "12 clever pieces after Micah gets done with the scissors"

I figured since we'd celebrated, I'd better look into the holiday a bit more. Apparently, legend has it that the Chinese used to battle at the beginning of the new year with a mythical beast, the Nian, or "year" in chinese. He'd come through and eat everything in it's path until they discovered it's weakness. The color red! A child wearing red scared it away, so they set out red lanterns, fireworks etc to scare it away and it never visited the village again!

So here's how I fared on some of the traditional (according to the ancient Chinese philosopher, Wikipedia) good and bad luck the new year brings:

Good luck

• Opening doors and windows to invite good luck in - We opened doors all day today, some even left open for AMAZING amounts of time!
• Sweets eaten to ensure a "sweet" year - Sweet!!! I never have a problem with this one.
• Clean house top to bottom before the new year comes to ensure good luck for the coming year - Ummm...how long does this have to last? The house looked AWESOME yesterday from 11:00-1:00 (hurried and cleaned it then left the house.) Of course by 2:00 it looked "lived in" again. But I did get it cleaned (you'll just have to take my word for it as Phil does)
• The night before, bathe your self in pomelo leaves to ensure good health for the rest of the year - Yes I had to look up pomelo. It's a citrus fruit like a grapefruit, which I ate 2 days ago - count it!

Bad luck

• Sweeping your floor on the first day is usually forbidden because it sweeps away good luck - yeah, but have they ever eaten rice with 3 boys and chopsticks! Give me a break!
• Washing your hair is considered to wash away your good luck - washed mine twice today because we went swimming.
• Saying words like finished and gone is bad luck - "Is your chicken gone?" "Are you finished with that rice yet?" "I'm finished, I'm going to bed!" hmmmm, ouch!

Well, hopefully that grapefruit from 2 days ago will make up for the rest. May you have better luck than me in the coming year!