Culture Quilt Traditions-Chinese New Year According to my mother, Chinese New Year started when in a village town, there was a beast attacked the village and eat their crops and livestock. The villagers came together and decided to make a lot of noise to scare the beast away and it worked. Because of that, the villagers decided to celebrate every year by making loud noises and setting off firecrackers so the beast would not come back. This is the myth that Chinese New Year is based on. Chinese New Year happens in January or February, based on the Lunar Calendar. The Zodiac changes every year with one out of the twelve animals. The way my mother celebrates it is the day before the fifteen-day celebration starts (but most people get the first …show more content…
My mom came from Malaysia, which has a flag similar to the United States Flag. Even though she comes from Malaysia, her ancestors came from China so she can be considered Chinese. My dad came from Virginia and he is a typical American. He has always lived in the United …show more content…
The day of celebration, December 25, was put in place by Pope Julius to replace the festival of Saturnalia. Multiple sources also state that Christmas was introduced by Constantine, the first Christian Roman Emperor because it was a Christian holiday. According to William Falk, the process of gift giving also originated during Saturnalia and that Christmas adopted that tradition. Even though Christmas was originally banned in the United States when the colonies were just being established, it was eventually legalized in the late 1680s and gifts of homemade toys were given. Gift giving was commercialized with the rise of the industrial revolution and became popular. Christmas trees were brought over by German settlers but didn’t become popular until 1848 when Queen Victoria received a Christmas tree and English magazines made it popular in the United Kingdom, which caught on in America. Christmas decorations originated from Thomas Edison’s assistant, Edward Johnson, who decorated a tree in New York in 1882 to show off Edison’s newest innovation, the lightbulb. It didn’t catch on until 1923 when the National Christmas Tree was lit up to promote the electricity