tradition of this character is that it is shown upside down and it may not be unlike your shoe the idea is you want to have food upside down because it will hold all the prosperity the new year the chinese new year we're entering is two thousand and fourteen but it has a different it's actually the year of the horse and the chinese know how to celebrate new year because they know just celebrate one day they celebrate for fifteen days with parades and dragons and all sorts of exciting things and i'll make our feel better we're going to celebrate the chinese new year and of course kato is here too in costume i think he looks like confucius or perhaps i don't know a drug dealer somebody said i don't know of any way welcome to make her feel better collin i am so thrilled you're here tonight this is very very special and this is collin nolan and i've known call and i don't know how long has it been four years something like something like that collin and i work together and in our work for several years we actually set a desk not unlike this just like this just like this maybe even a little bit closer and this is when we were not out in the field doing our work so we have shared a lot in the last year some of my work is changing and i'm actually changing again so we will see each other but not as much  in a working relationship so calling you've been on the show before i was on the show before we said i don't think i know you very long it was christmas but three years ago two years two years ago it was it was a while you can you know you i didn't know the set up but it was the show you had a great time i had a great time we made gingerbread houses it was the first time rbread houses as mine toppled to the ground yeah these were some friends of friends and wanted to be on the show and i knew they were designers but i didn't know they were going to show off i mean it was it was fun they good time i don't think they even knew they were showing off it was just so natural right to create a flying buttress out of gingerbread you know right and i would argue mine was probably the most delicious out of all i think so i think so well you were a very good sport you had we had we did have fun there and i promise you if you came back tonight we would have no wristy graduates and we were just be us and we we're celebrating i'm going to nigger and new things and prosperity and all that's coming  for me and for you i realize it's also worth researching things and not not going to see each other so this is why this is a very special show for me all what traditions do you have about new years do you do  anything i do every year i get together with my friends and typically we cook a huge meal everyone cooks something we all come together there's something that i really hold really close to my heart about everyone coming together and cooking food and bringing something everyone just kind of like tastes everything and we eat ourselves into a coma and usually just it's just a great time and you do you do that on new year's day or new year's eve that new year's  of crash at one place and puppy pile until the morning well in doing the research for the show part of the chinese new year tradition is a reunion meal and people they refer to it and tonight on the show we have several of our crew who have come back and it's cool we are having kind of a reunion night of bringing people together there is red everywhere because rid is the color of prosperity and good luck and good things in chinese tradition chinese brides i am told to not wear white they were red really yes i i know and in several asian cultures white is more of a color of mourning and it's not the purity that we have in red is is a joyous great great thing to have fact one of the traditions reading about it they said that the read came about because in ancient times there was this monster samurai i don't know how they pronounce the name and he was coming into the build as an eating the children and so they found out that red kept him away i don't know whether he's a he or a thing and so red became a color of its protection and good things  and one of the traditions is they will have surround the house and so we have some on bullets we will play with these little bit later they said actually your kids expect to have money in their what else you know that's what it is you're supposed to do and we do have some mantra oranges and even another orange mandarin oranges are all over the place for new years and whole fruit one thing said was important because the whole represents the whole of the year and we want everything to be full and and give us good tidings what we're going to do with art tonight because as with fireworks and we discuss is is that spaghetti or pizza or something the chinese invented paper they invented a lot of things and many many years ago i don't even know when it was it was so long ago that i thought we would make paper tonight are you glad i decided not to  paper were poor it and i said no instead i've got we have a variety of papers there some are there which you can pull out and we can look out and see i'm going to move our mandarin oranges here a little bit so we've got more these bulldozer and this some of those and i've got another bag here many of these i'm told are made in indonesia i don't know whether that's true or not and there are some over there even though even the redland there i think you can see some little petal some of these processes it's fun to do them one time and maybe not unlike making a homemade ice cream but after that you just assume to the store and buy your ice cream and there's a hot glue gun see what will come up with this for paper and playing with paper really like this paper like that ok there is some cardboard over here if you leave anything else to form your paper on which might work and there's even something that you can cut off and if you want to use this the swiss army knife i couldn't find my exacto knife tonight which was really frustrating all right we don't need it we're going to just go with what we have i was writing on the t two days ago and is there something the serendipity when you're thinking about something that has happened and these two people will stop this chinese jolie and ask him about what was the the years and he said oh it's the year of the horse and he said the again the the folktale the myth of that is that many years ago he and then he cautioned and said it's just a story ok is there a large celebration in chinatown in boston and i think they do have a pretty good celebration but i they can not set off fireworks because they are illegal in massachusetts sure i wanted to get us some sparklers for tonight but instead we're going to have to just go with we had sparklers a few years ago but you have to go to new hampshire to get support first that's right a friend and main her son was with the diplomatic corps in beijing if you just two years ago and she said the biggest problem is they don't just settle far for one day they set off fireworks for up there high we know how to tell everybody else what they need to do and we really do know but they just don't want to listen to us all the time we've had that conversation where we tell you now it's often said that capricorn slip backwards did you find that when you were younger and you felt older than your friends already said york yeah i think that that's probably pretty accurate i yeah i saw that fits pretty accurate i wasn't much of a daredevil when i was younger you would tell your friends of don't go do that because yeah something will happen and the more you say that the more i think it's true well the good news college is that you eventually age but we age backwards so  telling what you'll be doing by the time you're sixty and another another piece of trivia about there was one woman young girl and she ended up writing a book about fortune cookies and you know fortune cookies for an entire american invention that's however with a billion and point three people speaking chinese you know how long english that's very true now they also have a brush ink and there's some kind of rice paper read here so if you even want to play around with that you can even do that have to you get through doing your creation yes whatever this is you those are those truths other traditions since i have been away from the south i'm aware a lot more now and i've heard intellectual sort of people explain that in the south so much of the african american culture and the white culture are in a mixed and you don't know that to you step away and realize how many of their traditions come from food that was cooked very often from africa was brought to the south and then the cooks often were introducing those foods well there are many foods that you can take in flavor with a little bit of pork and you can feed so many people cheaply a lot of i think the rural communities you come up with food good yeah specially halloween but we we have a i have a group of friends who really enjoys holidays in general and i think we really take off with the holidays and just making the best of them it's on holidays we're pretty busy we do a lot of things and like it's a time we supposed to take to just relax and enjoy all the work that you've done take in the year but you know if you put creativity it's just part of your life now pretty much yeah you you know i'd like to hope most people did i wish they would because i think if they would do it they would feel better  it i i believe it's our natural state to be creators and once people get into just like usually they just can't stop sure the warning at some point you have to cut me off ok are we for you when you go no no would i pay you it's fabulous that you saw a paper is a medium to sculpt with oh yeah yes some people think that paper is do you want to process your piece it all already just want to let it be while we have a minute or two i mean if we could it is what it is but sure what you think about well i wasn't really sure what i was doing at first and then it kind of turned into this bouquet with a single flower and at some point  i feel like there's something and in the chinese culture especially about paper flowers and making paper flowers you know i personally three dimensions is kind of where i live everything is in three dimensions to me so i thought you know homey i could do some origami and of course i don't know how to do that but i made it up as i went along  and i think it turned out actually your hands didn't know how to do origami yes they that but you went right into it it's quite lovely i think that rhode island school of design would be quite  and several special friends have agreed to come on the show and i said we would once we have a show it's like wow our friendship has been placed in a different format so this really means a lot to me your friendship has meant so much to me and your wisdom and just your humor and everything so thank you for coming here and thank you for having me and and being here and we have our re