We have two very precious reasons to celebrate Chinese New Year!

Tate and Eliza!

We do, however, enjoy putting our own spin on it!

There are many traditions in China related to this holiday – most of them based on getting rid of evil spirits and bringing new luck to your family.

Also, each year is assigned a Chinese Zodiac, which rotates through a twelve year cycle.

This year is the celebration of the dog, which represents loyalty and honesty.

We enjoy sharing the littles heritage with them, just like we have with Grant all of these years.

This celebration gives us a great opportunity to talk about things like luck, evil spirits, and most importantly – Jesus.

Although China celebrates Chinese New Year for fifteen days, the calendar showed the actual Chinese New Year this year as Friday, February 16th.

We decided to celebrate this past Sunday evening.

It was super fun getting everything ready!

We had two very excited kiddos!

Illness was keeping us separated from our favorite people again, but we decided to go ahead with our celebration because this coming weekend we will be celebrating Grant’s day with another delicious Asian party!

I think these recipes need to be on our regular rotation!

Especially those cupcakes!!

We got out all of the chopsticks that we bought while in China, and I have to say I really enjoyed using them and only turned to my fork to get the last two bites off of my plate!

Instead of following the Chinese tradition of filling a red envelope with some money as a gift to represent prosperity, we bought some red bags and filled them with candy for the kiddos.

I guess I don’t need to say they enjoyed and are still enjoying their bags of candy!

The food was delicious, Tate and Eliza felt special, the conversations were deep and good, and even though we were missing our favorite people, Eliza did say we were having a “big circle day!”

Chinese New Year 2018 – you were a hit!