Towards a better Niu (Ox) Year

Quite frankly, we're not a superstitious or traditional family. As with a lot of traditions, it has been much watered down by our generation. We don't quite know things like the origins of eating dumplings (tang yuan) on Yuan Xiao Jie or staying up as late as we can on the eve of CNY. Most certainly, there's a lot of traditions that we either simply do not believe in or know about to observe.

Nonetheless, Louis and I were just browsing the emails that my elder SIL had forwarded to us recently about feng shui and/or predictions of our Chinese zodiac signs in the year of the Ox. One of the slides caught our attention.

It said that the actual first day of the lunar new year for this year falls on the calendar date of Wed, 4th Feb 09. On this day, it would be auspicious for individuals to be decked out in red, as well as to bank in some money into one's personal savings account to begin the year with a good start.

Supposedly, how the day turns out for your would set the tone for the rest of the year i.e. if the day turns out well for you, the entire would be good and vice versa.

We were jokingly telling my mom about it and I had expected her to laugh it off. To our surprise, she said very determinedly that she would come in red the next day.

For the fun of it, our little family decided that we might try to follow some of the advice given too. There's little harm in any of the things that we do, plus, one can never too much of any luck that we might get for this supposed tough year.

Hence, on Wed, I wore the reddest top that I have -- which actually is against a black background, but its the best that I can do. Louis has no clothes in red, so, he picked one of his t-shirt that had the loudest and brightest red prints on it. Faith certainly has no red clothes either, so she wore a bright pink dress with flowers for her class. I think my mom topped all of us by coming in with a bright red blouse :)

Becos I had to bring Faith for class and mornings are a mad rush for us, I'd asked my mom to bank in Faith's ang paos into her own account. On our part, Louis transferred some money from his working account to a joint savings account in our names -- we're not sure if that counts since we essentially transferring money around different accounts but its the best we can do. I told my mom to put some money into her account too but she told me she would tap her good luck from banking in money into Faith's account?!?! Oh well...

As for how the day went... hmmm.... it was nothing spectacular. Neither did anything bad happen. It was a normal, run-of-the-mill type of day. Which is not a bad thing, I gathered.

So, let's hope we'll be able to go through this year without any mishap like the last one that ended. If you're wondering what that mishap was, it was Louis' knee injury, of course :)