Lunar New Year

Lunar New Year is the first day of the lunisolar calendar kept in China and across much of East and Southeast Asia, and for many families it’s the biggest celebration of the year. It goes by many names: the Spring Festival, or Chūnjié, in China, Tết in Vietnam and Seollal in Korea. Wherever it’s kept, the heart of it is the same. People head home, sweep out the old year and sit down together to welcome the new one.

A new year set by the moon

The Chinese calendar follows the moon and the sun at once. Each month begins on the day of a new moon, counted in China’s time zone, and a leap month slips in about seven times every 19 years to keep the months in step with the seasons. The new year begins with the second new moon after the winter solstice, not counting a leap month, which lands it between January 21 and February 20. The Hong Kong Observatory publishes the dates in its calendar tables. This countdown works them out from the moon itself and matches the Observatory’s tables for every year from 2026 to 2050.

Every year also carries one of 12 zodiac animals and one of five elements, so the full cycle takes 60 years to come round. That’s why you’ll hear of a Fire Horse year or a Wood Dragon year, not just a Horse or a Dragon.

One new moon, many celebrations

In China the season is called guònián, crossing the year. Homes are cleaned and stocked, red decorations go up, and the whole family gathers for a long dinner on New Year’s Eve. Children get red envelopes of lucky money, and lion dances and firecrackers fill the streets. All that red goes back to an old legend about Nian, a fierce creature said to prey on villages on the last day of the year until people learned to scare it off. The celebrations wind up on the 15th day with the Lantern Festival.

In Vietnam, families make offerings to the Kitchen God, Ông Táo, who returns to heaven just before Tết to report on the household. They put up a bamboo new year tree called a cây nêu, fill the house with peach or yellow apricot blossoms and share bánh chưng, sticky rice wrapped in leaves.

In Korea, people dress in hanbok, bow deeply to their elders in a greeting called sebae, play the board game yut and eat tteokguk, a soup of sliced rice cakes. Tibetan and Himalayan communities keep Losar on their own lunisolar calendars, and there are several of them: in 2026 Gyalpo Losar fell on February 18, the day after Lunar New Year.

In the US, neighborhoods from San Francisco to New York and Washington, D.C. mark the day with parades and lion dances, and a 2023 New York law closes every public school in the state for it.