On New Year's Eve, families get together to send off the old year and usher in the new, a year which they hope will be rich in harvest, happiness and success. Everybody goes to bed later than uaual. Some spend the night to watch the year go out, chatting or playing card games, watching TV and nibbling sweets and nuts and all sorts of delicacies. For the children, it is a treat to set off firecrackers and fireworks and you can hear them pop and bang throughout the night. The first two days of the new year are spent visting friends or relatives.
Most people go back to work on the fourth day.
In the countryside, however, festivities go on until the fifteenth day which is Lantern Festival. During Lantern Festival, people decorate their homes with colourful lanterns and treat themselves with Yuanxiao, a kind of glutinous rice flour balls stuffed with sweet fillings or meat or dried cassia flower. Throughout China, lanterns of every description are put on public display. The Chinese people sometimes call it the Yuanxiao Festival because they like to eat small round dumplings of sticky rice containing sweet fillings. Along the main streets in many towns and cities different kinds of Chinese lanterns were hung.