Chinese New Year wayyyy cooler than the Western New Year (sorry dudes) because we take 15 freaking days to celebrate it. 15 days of freakin’ par-taying, wearing red, and saying nice auspicious things to each other. But before I go into all the customs and traditions, you totally gotta know how this festival came about, and like the Chong Yang festival, it totally involves the slaying of a monster.

So like, a long time ago, the earth had sooo many freaking monsters and stuff, and the most ghastly and fearsome and evil of all these monsters was called Nian. And on New Year’s eve the Nian was come and mess shit up for people and eat them and like, cause a lot of chaos, so people were like, scared shitless of this monster. On one particular Lunar New Year’s Eve, an old man came to the village and saw that errbody was all frowny faced and sighing and stuff, so he totally had to ask them why they were sad.

“Oh hey guys, so why are you like, totally sad?”

“Um, did you not get the memo? It’s Lunar New Year’s Eve and this sucks balls because the Nian would come and eat us and f*** shit up at midnight, bro.” one of the villagers replied.

The old man was like, “Kay. Imma go to the Nian and tell him not to eat you guys,” and all the villagers thought he was like, freaking crazy or something because like, hello? How do you reason with a vicious monster?

Anyway, when the old man got to the Nian he was like, “Dude, can you like, stop eating people? It’s really wrecking everything you know.”

And the Nian was like, “Um, yeah, that’s kind of the whole point. Anyway, why are you here? Aren’t you scared that I would like, totally eat you?”

“You? Eat me? Yeah right. That’s not even a mean feat ‘cause I’m like, suuuuper old. I’d only be impressed if you ate all the snakes around here. That’d show people how powerful you really are.”

So the Nian ate all the snakes in the mountains and sucked them all up in his mouth.

“Happy?”

“Eh, I’ve seen more powerful demons that can beat up all the tigers ‘round here.” said the old man, and so the Nian was like, kay, whatevs, and beat up all the tigers. 

“What about this, old man? Aren’t I powerful?”

So the old man was, “Okay okay, you can eat me now, but it’s kinda dumb to eat a person with all his clothes on, right? So Imma take off my clothes and you can eat me.” 

The old man took off his clothes and the Nian saw, to his complete horror, that the man was wearing freakin’ red underwear, and he was scared shitless of that, and he didn’t eat the old man. So like, the old man told errbody to paste red paper on their doors, and make like, lots of noise by beating drums and lighting up firecrackers. When the Nian came, he was sooo scared that he didn’t even wanna try eating these people, and ran like, freakin’ far away.

Then errbody realized that the old man knew the secret to defeating this big, scary monster, and that he must totally be an immortal, but y’know, that’s besides the point ‘cause from then on, red became this super auspicious colour of the New Year, and everyone would paste red paper out of their houses. Later on, they would write really poetic auspicious phrases on these pieces of red paper. They would also play with firecrackers and make lotsa noise and stuff, which is totally awesome.

By the way, Nian also means year in Chinese, and it totally looks like this: 年. So the villagers were kind of scaring the new “year,” as it were, but if you ask me, I totally think that the nian kind of represents all the bad stuff and the shittiness of the old year, not the new one, and that you have to chase it all away by celebrating the new year and hope that errthing will be for the best.

Also, an artistic rendering of the Nian:

He’s like, big and fearsome, isn’t he? 

In the next post, Imma totally talk about why we write freakin’ Chinese couplets, so keep checking back!

Also, happy conventional English New Year, guys! We’ll make it a good one and chase the shittiness of the old year away. =)