Happy [Lunar] New Year! ain't it great having it twice? There's a whole lot to say about the Lunar New Year, also called the Spring Festival, as it marks the start of springtime. (Forget Groundhog Day!) I'm not going to say it all, there's plenty of information out there, so I'm gonna focus on the food. For New Year's, whole extended families gather together (requiring the Railway Bureau to double the length of trains) and have big feasts. With all kinds of auspicious foodstuffs, there are dozens of obligatory items to chow down. A lot of them are phonetically derived and make little sense in ingles. Others make more sense. Let's see... Dumplings- they look like "yuan bao", basically a dumpling shaped gold ingot. Candy- sweet food sweet people. 10 Vegetable Mix- for a rounded and full whatever. 8 Treasures Rice (contains beans and bean products)- similar concept, 8 is a lucky number. Eggs- sorry, I forgot why. Just eat your eggs. String Beans- aka Four Seasons Beans- four seasons of peace Other items to put on the menu: Chicken, fish, turnip cake, sticky rice cake, oranges, anything else you're hungry for. About the pictures: Shen Ding and Mei Jing, the pair from "Stupid Melon Dumb Egg" are the two featured hear in this set of pictures. Melon (Shen) on the left holds a banner reading "Nian Nian You Yu"- A Surplus Every Year. Egg (Mei) on the right holds a benner reading "Wan Shih Roo Yee"- All Things as You Wish. Red and gold are the colors of New Years, and most other festivals, for that matter.