People Celebrate the Lunar New Year in China for the Year of the Horse
About this video
This video offers a warm and human look at how ordinary people celebrate the Lunar New Year, specifically the Year of the Horse. It moves from crowded city squares to quiet village homes, showing the many faces of the holiday. You will see a grandfather teaching his grandson how to write spring couplets, a group of friends setting off fireworks in a field, and a street performer breathing fire to the delight of onlookers. The camera lingers on small details, like the steam rising from a pot of dumplings or the way a child’s eyes widen at a lion dance. It is a reminder that behind the grand spectacles, the heart of the holiday is about family, luck, and hope for the year ahead.
Video transcript
Happy New Year from Beijing, the capital of China. It's not January 1st, but it's the Lunar New Year. It's the first day of the year of the horse. The Chinese zodiac has 12 animals, and we've given away to the year of the snake and started the year of the horse. So, what happens on Lunar New Year? Lunar New Year is the biggest holiday in China. If you include the weekends, people in China will spend China get 9 days off. And what do they do? Well, a lot of them go home to their hometowns. They go home, and on New Year's Eve, they have dinner with their
families. It's a big traditional get-together kind of gathering. And then, on New Year's Day, a lot of them will go to temples to wish for happiness, for whatever they want in in the new year. Another important activity is what where we are right now, which is a temple fair. Temple fairs are on the sites of temples or former temples, and they're places where booths are set up, and people bring their children, people bring their partners, and they come here for uh for fun, to eat some food, to watch some some traditional performances, to buy some trinkets
and souvenirs, and all that kind of thing. So, it's really a day of of celebration here in China. Um the holiday will go on for another week or so, and people will keep enjoying themselves and also relaxing from the busy pace of work while looking ahead to a really great year in the coming year of the horse.
