The Legend of the Spring Festival

I found this telling of the Lunar New Year legend here and liked it so much I wanted to share it.

"The Chinese New Year is now popularly known as the Spring Festival because it starts from the Begining of Spring (the first of the twenty-four terms in coodination with the changes of Nature). Its origin is too old to be traced. Several explanations are hanging around. All agree, however, that the word Nian, which in modern Chinese solely means "year", was originally the name of a monster beast that started to prey on people the night before the beginning of a new year (the new year in terms of the Chinese calendar).

The beast Nian had a very big mouth that would swallow a great many people with one bite. Nian always lives in deep sea, but on every New Year´s Eve, it will climb up the seashore and attack animals and humans. People were very scared. So, every year on New Year´s Eve, people had to run away and go into mountain to avoid the attack of Nian.

On the New Year´s Eve of this year, when people were packing for retreat to the mountain as usual, an old man came to their rescue, offering to subdue Nian. The people didn´t believe he could do that, but they failed to persuade him to run away. Finally, the people all went to the mountain, and left the old man alone to stay.

When the beast Nian was going to break into village as usual, the old man suddenly fired off crackers. The huge sound scared Nian, and made it so horror-stricken that it did not dare to keep toward front walk. Here, the old man, dressed all in red, came out and laughed. Nian turned pale with fright and ran away in a flurry.

The next day, when people came back, they found that nothing was damaged. Originally, the old man was immortalized as a god. Now that Nian was gone, people began to enjoy their peaceful life. Before the old man left, he had told people to put up red paper decorations on their windows and doors at each year´s end to scare away Nian in case it sneaked back again, because red is the color the beast feared the most."

The legend explains so much that I have noticed in China, these last weeks and days leading up to the new year: the wearing of red that is popular this time of year, how people adorn their homes with red banners, lanterns, and signs, and of course, the bane of our current existence, fireworks. sigh. Vivian has almost learned to sleep through them.