The lunar new year traditionally celebrates the earth's renewed fertility. The fifteen day New Year season finds celebrants sandbagging themselves and each other with the food, colors, shapes, sounds, and even syllabels that bespeak health, happiness, fertility, and fortune for the coming twelve month span.
In the spirit of setting things straight, all account books should be balanced, debts paid off, and houses cleaned before New Year's Day. Then houses, businesses, and streets are decked and draped with banners, flowers, and scroll of vivid red, a traditionally lucky and demond dispelling hue. People exchanged red wrapped gifts, most commonly the hong bao cash enclosed in a compact red paper packet and offer their friends propitious edibles such as red dates (whose chinese name, hong zao, sounds like the words for "prosperity comes soon") and tangerines (whose cantonese pronunciation, kat, sounds like that of the word for "lucky").
While celebrants avoid using swearwords during this season, and parents warn their children againts inadvertently blurting out such inauspicious words as death or disaster, this is by no means a time for keeping silent. Street festivals are alive with sound of firecrakers. (when these were banned in Singapore, resourceful celebrants played cassette tapes of exploding firecrackers.)
