What you should know about Lunar New Year, Colorado’s newest state holiday
Colorado Sun
Story by Parker Yamasaki and photos by Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun
Flashes of red and gold, the official colorway of the Lunar New Year, can be seen throughout Colorado in January and February. The symbolic colors — red for good luck and to ward off evil, gold for wealth and success — adorn dancing lanterns, crisp envelopes and ornaments hung from branches of forsythia and cherry blossoms.
“It’s kind of like decorating our Christmas tree,” said Mimi Luong, owner of Truong An Gifts.
Luong’s business is a cornerstone of the Little Saigon district in Denver, located in the Far East Center, a U-shaped shopping center on South Federal Boulevard. Her father started the shop in 1975 after fleeing the Vietnam War. These days, Luong is known for throwing big, cultural celebrations, like Lunar New Year.
Though Asian communities around Colorado have celebrated Lunar New Year for as long as they’ve been here, this is the first year that it was celebrated as an official state holiday. The designation is mostly symbolic — it’s not a paid holiday off — but that acknowledgement is meaningful, especially to people like Luong’s parents, whose quiet family tradition has since expanded into a weekslong slate of programming and festivities at the Far East Center.
Or people like Nga Vương-Sandoval, who also fled the Vietnam War as a child, and spearheaded the passage of the holiday into state law.
“When we went to the designation ceremony, I didn’t understand at that time why my mom was crying so much,” Luong said. “She was just so happy. It’s the feeling of America accepting you — you look different, you speak a different language — and they’re accepting your heritage, culture, traditions and embracing that and wanting to learn more. That’s huge to her.”
Here are a few things to know about the culturally important and visually stunning holiday.
Colorado’s Lunar New Year fell a week before the actual holiday
The Lunar New Year, as the name suggests, is based on a lunisolar calendar, which integrates moon phases into the 12-month solar calendar. Because of this, Lunar New Year falls on a different date every year. This year, it falls on Feb. 10. Next year it will be on Jan. 29, a few days before the state holiday.
Rather than try to educate the public about the complexities of a different calendar year, organizers who helped write the holiday into state law decided to mark the holiday on the first Friday of February every year.
From left: Chance Horiuchi gives out packs of noodles and red envelopes, which traditionally contain money and are gifted to family during the Lunar New year. In the next photos, decorations line vendor tents and a lion dance takes place on stage. (Photos by Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)
“It’s a complete paradigm shift for those of us in the Western Hemisphere who are used to the Gregorian solar calendar,” Vương-Sandoval said. “The more complex the process is, the less likely the understanding and appreciation it would get, which takes away from the holiday itself. We chose something more digestible. We chose addition over trigonometry.”
The first Friday will always fall within the same window of time that the Lunar New Year occurs, though it won’t often overlap perfectly.
This year, the state-designated holiday landed a week before the actual holiday, which felt unusual to some, since the weeks leading up to the holiday often involve intense preparation, like house cleaning and cooking big family feasts. “You wouldn’t celebrate New Year’s Eve on Dec. 20, would you?” Luong said. But she’s still happy to see the holiday receive so much recognition. “I guess we just have to party double time.”
Lunar New Year will look different for future generations in Colorado
Asian Americans are the fastest-growing population in the United States, according to the Pew Research Center. In Colorado, there are almost 300,000 people of Asian descent, a population that has been steadily growing for over a decade and which has almost doubled since 2010.
That number makes up a continent’s worth of Lunar New Year traditions that don’t typically intermingle in Asia. In Colorado, though, those traditions exist side-by-side. For instance, the Far East Center’s programming features K-pop dance classes, Japanese taiko drumming, Filipino singers, Vietnamese cooking and Chinese medicine all lined up under one festive banner.
From top: Chance Horiuchi gives out packs of noodles. Under that, bubble tea and other beverages are served as attendees peruse a Lunar New Year Festival event. (Photos by Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)
“Here in the United States, there’s something really beautiful when you see multiple ethnicities and cultures melded together for one united message and one united celebration,” Vương-Sandoval said. But she also worried about what the holiday could become without the right education surrounding it.
“It’s really important to ensure that the focus is on these cultures and traditions and not things that are going to be mass marketed, commercialized,” she said. “The intangible things are always the most significant. Especially coming from a background where my family and I did lose everything tangible, the holidays are one of those really special aspects that will forever be with us.”
There will be fireworks and dancing lions
Most of the traditions during Lunar New Year are about welcoming what you want in the upcoming year and fending off what you don’t. Qualities like health, luck and fortune are summoned through richly symbolic food, decorations, clothing and performances.
During the lion dance, duos of dancers draped in red and gold mimic the movements of a lion, spinning and stomping around, often telling a story while also ridding the upcoming year of bad energy. “(Lions) are big and mystical and they’re supposed to be scary looking,” Luong said. “So, it scares away all the negative energy. And then the beat of the drums and the stomping of their feet is what shakes the bad vibrations out.”
To see for yourself, the Far East Center has a schedule of lion dances around metro Denver through February.
As for the fireworks, those are also about scaring away “bad juju,” as Luong put it. “The louder the better.”