One of DD's social studies themes in holidays. I have been avoiding reading some fine print in my sales & use tax manual by planning our study of Chinese New Year, which this year falls on Sunday, January 29th.

One of DD's best friends was adopted from China, and we are going to celebrate with her family and another DF, who traveled with Amy to China when she went to bring the baby home. There will be 16 of us celebrating and here is our plan:

Clean House-all 3 families will clean their own homes together on Sunday during the day to sweep away any back luck from the previous year, then they will come to our house in the late afternoon.

Make decorations-the kids will make paper lanterns (younger) and paper cutting pictures (older) and glitter fireworks on black paper, and red envelopes with their age number symbols drawn on them with black sharpies. They can also make scrolls by painting black symbols for wishes for the New Year, such as prosperity, health, or peace on long white paper and mounting them on red background papers.

Money for the red envelopes: each child will have some crisp new money put into his/her red envelope.

We will make dumpling filling at our house and provide wrappers, so everyone can pitch in to make dumplings when we get hungry. One family is bringing noodles and the other a ginger custard, so we should be pretty well set for food.

I also have some gorgeous Chinese bamboo flute music we can listen to, Amy is bringing a large map of China, and both other families are bringing their photo albums of the trip to China 4 years ago so we can look at those again as well.

Should be fun!

Gung Ho Fat Choy or is it Kung Hei Fat Choy?