New Year’s Poetry Slam

Today is New Year’s Eve.

And Ground Hog’s Day, but that’s beside the point.

In the Chinese calendar, tomorrow is the first day of the new year. So tonight, to celebrate the holiday and as the culmination of our semester-long study of China, we invited a few friends and graduate students from China for dinner.

We ate whole fish (a symbol of plenty), homemade dumplings, new year’s “cakes” (made of rice and red beans), and lots of other yummy food.  The kids kotoued to us (which I could get used to!) to get the money that we had put in their hongbao (small red envelopes which the boys and I made and decorated this morning).

The whole evening was a blast.  But the best part for me was watching the kids, including the kids we went to China with this summer, work with the grad students to make spring couplets.  In China, people decorate doorways and windows with couplets of poetry for the New Year.  They are beautifully painted and celebrate the advent of spring.  Families leave them up until the next year, when they are replaced with new couplets.

Ezra worked for a really long time with Wei to complete his couplet, copying one I had printed from a kit.  Zach made his own, selecting and copying different characters from worksheets.  Translated, his read:

Winter, Leave, Snow, Go, Slowly & Spring, Flower, Rain, Come, Quickly

He was insanely proud.

But it’s not like Zach is even the best poet in our house.  Just Monday, Ezra picked his nose and proudly held up his treasure for me to see.  “Look, Momma!  It looks like cabbage. But burnt.”

Don’t try to tell me he doesn’t have a poet’s eye.

He’s gonna be a poet, and I just know it.