A friend of mine sent out some chinese new year’s greeting yesterday to both his pinoy and chinese friends.  Since the greetings is for prosperity and good luck, I would like to share it in this blog:

Chinese New Year is fast approaching!  Jan 25 – New Year’s Eve and Jan 26 – Chinese New Year!

Here are some tips and things to prepare for the coming new year.  Please prepare it on Jan 25 🙂

• Please pay all your bills before the new year.  This is to ensure that you won’t have “utang” in the entire year of 2009.
• Do not spend money on Jan 26 as much as possible.  Prepare a fish dish on Jan 25 evening.
• For luck and health, you need to prepare the following:  (No substitutes please)  2 pcs of pineapple, 4 pcs of pear, 10 pcs of bananas, 2 packs of gold coin candy, 2 pcs of Chinese Mamon or Huat Ke, 2 boxes of tikoy – glutinous rice cake.  Place them in the dining table on New Year’s Eve and eat some of them on New Year’s Day.
• For money, you need to gather coins (those 5 cents or 10 cents coin so that you can gather a lot) and walk backwards from your gate while sprinkling the coins.  Sprinkle the coins to each entrance or door of your house. Do this before going out of the house on New Year’s Day.

Good Luck and Happy New Year again!

I hail from a traditional Filipino family and I see some similarities on the two culture’s new year’s traditions. For one, the paying of the bills and not spending on the new year’s day was one also preached and practiced by my parents when we were kids in Quezon. The fruits for the new year I even written a post here in my blog. The traditions varies (from being weird, uncommon to logical, quite OK) and as long as they are for prosperity, good health, peace, harmony and other positive things I’m fine with them.

Special thanks to Junjun for sharing this one.

Happy new year y’all!