Today is the Chinese New Year. FFAPL wishes good health and success to everyone celebrating Lunar New Year.

The Spring Festival, or Chun Jie, is the New Year calculated according to the traditional Chinese calendar. The Spring Festival is celebrated in China and by Chinese people around the world. Lunar New Year is also observed by other Asian people. For Spring Festival, people celebrate by sharing greetings, pasting Spring Festival luck poems around their doors, set off firecrackers, attending dragon and lion dance parades, and gathering with family for the New Year’s Eve dinner. They also send “red envelopes” with gifts for younger relations.

If you would like to learn more about the Chinese New Year, the Albany Public Library has many books for on the topic. For the youngest readers check out Bringing in the New Year by Grace Lin.
Lunar new year by Hannah Eliot and Alina Chau explains the decorations and celebrations of New Year in detail.

And, if you have been celebrating Spring Festival for all of your life, may we take this opportunity to remind you about the Albany Public Library’s Chinese Language collection. Located at the Pine Hills branch, the Chinese language collection includes over 2,700 include both fiction, nonfiction and magazines for children and adults.

Chinese Collection at Pine Hills