Young people display their chun lian, or Spring Festival couplets, which are part of the traditional celebrations of the Chinese New Year. Photo: CFP

For more than 4,000 years the Spring Festival, or the Chinese Lunar New Year, has been the most important festival in Chinese culture. It's a time for families to get together and pray for better lives. In the past throughout China, and in Shanghai, people began celebrating the festival on the 23rd day of the 12th month of the Chinese lunar calendar - seven days before the Lunar New Year's Eve. The celebrations lasted until the Lantern Festival (on the 15th day of the first lunar month).

But times have changed and many of the traditional ways of celebrating the festival have vanished. With two weeks to go before the Spring Festival for 2015 begins the Global Times talked to some people about the way things used to be.

Seventy-one-year-old Lang Chuansheng grew up in a remote village in Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province. In the 1940s and 1950s in his hometown, on the 23rd day of the 12th lunar month of the Chinese calendar locals venerated the Kitchen God by arranging special dishes and snacks on the stove, the first in a series of rituals for the Spring Festival.

Fireworks are always part of the Chinese New Year. Photo: CFP

Early waking

Praying to gods was a very important part of the traditions. Apart from the Kitchen God, Lang vividly remembered the way they prayed to Buddha on the 28th day of the 12th Chinese lunar month. "My parents woke me very early - before 2 am."

As a small boy he, his father, uncles and brothers then knelt in their home facing the south to pray. Women were not allowed to participate.

"We had no statues or pictures of Buddha in the home and I had no idea which Buddha I was praying to," Lang said. The family offered cooked chickens and ducks as a gift for Buddha. "We stuck two pairs of chopsticks wrapped with chicken and goose intestines inside a whole steamed chicken to show that we were devoted to Buddha." The chopsticks wrapped with intestines signified that they had offered everything they had to Buddha.

The Spring Festival was also a time to worship ancestors and this was usually done the day before the Lunar New Year, when dishes, bowls and chopsticks were arranged in a special pattern on the table and, later, all the family, women included, knelt and prayed facing the north. "This was quite different from the way we worshipped Buddha," Lang said.

For him though the highlight of the Spring Festival was not the worshipping but the dinner on the Lunar New Year's Eve. For this dinner the family enjoyed special dishes of shrimps, chicken, fish balls and meat balls. It was most memorable meal of the entire year.

"We also used to cook a big fish, but no one was allowed to eat it." This was a tradition connected with the saying nian nian you yu (having a surplus every year). "Because the saying sounded like the expression 'we have fish every year' in Chinese - many people used to cook a fish for the Chinese New Year's Eve dinner but didn't eat it for luck."

Restaurant staff pay tribute to the Kitchen God by arranging special dishes and snacks. Photo: IC

Rationing coupons

Ying Jianhua is a 54-year-old Shanghainese public servant who also remembers being woken early for Spring Festival traditions when she was young. She wasn't woken to pray to Buddha but to go shopping.

In the 1960s there were difficult financial times in China and there was food rationing throughout the country. People were given food coupons (there were also coupons for clothing) which allowed them to buy basic ingredients.

Ying recalled being woken by her older sisters at about 3 am, a couple of days before the Spring Festival. It was a freezing cold morning but the girls had to walk to a nearby State-owned food market and queue there until it opened. The market didn't open until 5 am but most people believed the early customers would get the best quality goods.

"Just before Spring Festival, the country gave every family a special New Year coupon as well as the normal meat and grain coupons," Ying said. "With this coupon a family could buy a New Year food package with black fungus, walnuts, dried mushrooms and other extras."

Growing up in a poor family, Ying was only allowed to buy luxury sweets like preserved plums during the Spring Festival. This made her happy but the thing that made her happiest was seeing one of her older sisters return from Anhui Province to celebrate the festival with her family. That sister was a zhiqing (educated youth), one of the millions sent to work in rural areas during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). "Every year she came back for the Lunar New Year, bringing Anhui treats like sweet potatoes. I was always delighted with the food she brought home," Ying said.

As a native Shanghainese, what Ying enjoyed most about the Spring Festivals in the 1960s was not the food but the fun of visiting the City God Temple. As a child, on every first day of the lunar calendar Ying would visit her grandparents and then go to the temple - a paradise for children with colorful shops, stalls and entertainers.

Peepshows are one of the old traditional entertainments. Photo: CFP

Popular peepshows

One of the popular entertainments was the peepshow where viewers looked through a lens to watch a colorful story unfold. "The pictures were usually fairytales and you watched while the operator told the story." Ying said it like the way today's young people present PowerPoint slides. "But I adored this when I was a child."

After the peepshow, the young girl would go to comic bookstores - they didn't sell comics here but if you paid a small amount you could sit alongside other children and read a comic of your choice.'

Yuyuan Garden was once the must-go-to place for locals especially during the Lantern Festival (the 15th day of the first lunar month). One of the most important festival events involves taking part in or viewing the shows of the Lantern Festival and is often regarded as the formal end of the Spring Festival celebration.

Lang Chuansheng's daughter Lang Jing grew up in Tangqi, a water town in suburban Hangzhou, and recalled that in the late 1980s, the riverside streets in the town were packed with people every Lantern Festival. As night fell, people carried their homemade lanterns along the streets.

"One year, my father and his colleagues made this huge goat lantern - it was bigger than I was." The 42-year-old Lang Jing was 14 at the time and she was delighted by the way the goat moved by itself. "Dad and his friends had put an electric fan in the lantern to make it move. It was so much fun."

But worshipping Buddha in the early morning, cooking but not eating fish, peepshows and comic books could all become mere memories.

"The Spring Festival is not what it used to be," said Lang Jing, who came and settled in Shanghai in 1994. In the past she has always celebrated the Chinese New Year with her family in Tangqi town, but this year she has decided not to. "My grandmother lived there but sadly she passed away a few months ago."

Lang's family now eats its Chinese New Year dinner at restaurants - "Preparing a big meal at home isn't easy."

Enjoying Chinese New Year dinners at restaurants is popular nowadays. Photo: IC

Restaurant dinners

Lu Zhenhua is another Shanghai man who will join his family for dinner at a restaurant this year. The 27-year-old remembers living in a shikumen (the traditional stone-gated houses) in Zhabei district in the 1990s and watching people get together after dark to set off fireworks.

"Later, our old houses were pulled down and we had to relocate to an apartment far away."

Lu thinks that nowadays the Spring Festival has turned into a boring time of eating, watching television and phubbing. "But you can do this any time."

Chen Qinjian is the vice-president of the China Folklore Society and a tenured professor at East China Normal University, and he agrees that many festival traditions and customs are dying out. "Folklore records described more than 80 Spring Festival customs in old Shanghai, but I'm afraid fewer than 10 are still in vogue today," he told the Global Times.

He believes the government should be protecting the old customs and traditions. "It has an obligation to educate and encourage people to inherit the culture of older generations," he said.

This year, after 36 people were killed in a stampede at the Bund during the New Year celebrations, local authorities announced that the traditional Yuyuan Garden lantern show would be cancelled for safety reasons. "This is an impractical way of solving the problem," Chen said. "There is no need to give up eating if you are worried about choking."

Travel plans 

Last month ctrip.com, China's major travel booking website, conducted a nationwide survey which showed that almost 80 percent of the Chinese netizens questioned hoped to spend the upcoming Spring Festival holiday traveling away from home.

"The situation in Shanghai is the same," said Shi Kaifeng, a PR manager with ctrip.com.

He said that this year, the number of Shanghai residents who have bought Spring Festival tours or tickets via ctrip.com had increased dramatically. "The number of people in Shanghai making their own travel arrangements has doubled from the same period last year," he said. "The number of people on group tours has also increased by 50 percent."

Whereas in the past, most people preferred to stay at home during the Spring Festival, nowadays, more people are choosing to travel and go sightseeing during this period. "Because the festival is no longer so interesting more people are regarding it as just another holiday," Shi said.

Ying agrees. For the last Spring Festival she went to neighboring Jiangsu Province, and she is thinking about traveling somewhere else this year. But Ying still enjoys the festival. "In the old days we celebrated it in more traditional ways. Today, we enjoy rich food, convenient transport and advanced communication technology - which all contribute to a happy modern Spring Festival."