Happy Lunar New Year to the billions of people around the world who celebrate!
About the Lunar New Year / Chinese New Year
According to National Geographic, “ Lunar New Year, often called the Spring Festival or Chinese New Year, is the most important holiday in China and Chinese communities around the world. It is not only celebrated in China. Vietnam, Korea, Malaysia, and Singapore also celebrate the Lunar New Year holiday. The two-week celebration includes family and friends, feasting and fireworks, parties and parades.
For more than 3,000 years, Lunar New Year was just what it sounds like—the beginning of a new year in the Chinese calendar. The historic Chinese calendar is a lunisolar calendar, meaning dates are determined by both the moon (lunar) and the sun (solar). Months begin with every new moon, when the moon is not visible in the night sky. The new year starts on the new moon nearest the midpoint between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, sometime between January 21 and February 20.”
The Calendar
2025 is the year of the (Wood) Snake
According to an interview on NBC with Jonathan H. X. Lee, an Asian and Asian American studies professor at San Francisco State University whose research focuses in part on Chinese folklore: “It’s all about “shedding toxicity in personality, in character traits. It’s shedding the ego, letting go of the past, letting go of anger, letting go of love lost,” Lee said. “This is the year where that kind of growth — personal and macro, internal and external — is very much possible.”
Lee said that the snake is an auspicious sign for inner work, whether it’s releasing unrealistic expectations of loved ones or getting rid of bad habits. The snake, which matches up with the years of people born in 1941, 1953, 1965, 1977, 1989, 2001, 2013 and 2025, is most commonly associated with intelligence, resilience and love, Lee said. And people born in those years are thought to do “whatever it takes to accomplish a goal.” “They are known to have this innate potential to be really successful, because they can think outside the box, and they will endure and they will persevere,” Lee said.
More specifically, this year is that of the wood snake, with the wood element holding profound meaning across the three major organized Chinese religions. In Daoism, the wood is a sign of returning to one’s natural state or true nature, while in Confucianism it symbolizes becoming a more polished person. In Buddhism, it’s associated with letting go for growth.
The positive qualities attached to the snake are anchored in two folklore tales, Lee explained. In the story of the creation of the Chinese zodiac, the snake was once a four-legged, happy creature who became angry after other animals isolated him because of his appearance. Blaming the Jade Emperor for creating him that way, the snake’s anger morphed into physiological changes, like growing fangs, and prompted him to snap at the other creatures.