Ariel Yining Loh: Chinese New Year Celebrations (Year of the Dog 2018)

*posted March 23

Blog Post for Feb 15th - 21st.

Happy Year of the Dog! :D

Lots of photos, not much text (surprise surprise), so I'm just gonna bring you all through it!

Hope your celebrations (for my Asian friends) and surroundings (for my non-Asian friends with Asian friends) were festive and exciting and brought you lots of joy and happiness!

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Celebration at Home

Obviously, we took the opportunity to deck out the house in red and gold.

Here are the various decorations that we've amassed over the years.

over the door thing, red packets hanging from some fake flowers, and a wall hanging thing

don't you just LOVE how eloquent I am right now? lol

here's a view of our "living room", blue draping thing is the "door" to my parents' room

also Chinese New Year CDs from like...the late 90s and early 00's.

We also had hot pot. Again. haha XD

What can I say? This is new year food for us, which given that we're Chinese, means that there's a huge possibility of having it twice a year lol

glass noodles and various veggies

NOT a huge fan of the first one, forget what it's called though...

abalone (YUM YUM YUM I LOVE THIS STUFF), starting from top left > fish tofu > fish / squid balls > mushrooms > (in the middle) fish dumplings, ground pork wrapped in tofu skins

These were my FAVORITE things on the table. No beef to compete, so I pretty much devoured this list... I was nice about it though. I at least asked before I took more. lol

pork slices, delicious broth made by Mum (she boils bones overnight in our vacuum pot, Cantonese (Dad's heritage, actually) way of making high quality, healthy soups)

Tom Yum paste (my must-have in my hot pot soup), which is amazing because I actually can't handle spicy super well, but I love this flavor in my broth

Mum putting stuff in.

stuff is boiling

Mum is waiting for it to cook

my first bowl...and when it was almost finished

my second bowl, Tom Yum edition

I also spied a lovely thing being made here...hmm...what could it be? ;)

For a home celebration...it was NOT TOO SHABBY. <3

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Celebration at CCF

I'll update this eventually with videos of the "talent show" section of the celebrations...

We had 1) worship, 2) "talent show" with three performance items (1: dance, 2: piano performance, 3: "girls' band thing").

Dad popped a CNY decoration under the cross so that the worship team's "backdrop" would look a little more festive.

What do we think? :)

decor around the church kitchen doorframe, dessert table (also, recognize the pink + yellow + green dessert?)

the colorful dessert is a childhood favorite of mine that Mum calls "Chinese delight" (after Turkish delight from the Chronicles of Narnia). Not its actual name, but whatever. lol

More dessert table details