fbpx

Chinese Lantern Festival

A Lantern of Chinese Tradition

A Chinese lantern is typically red. It has a red string at the top to hold; it also has some Chinese words on its body and gold strips at the bottom. It is normally in red and gold because both colors mean richness and luck, as a traditional wish. Inside of the Chinese lantern is made of red cloth and has a candle to light it up. Thousands and millions of Chinese lanterns are hanged in the sky over the streets on the day of the Chinese Lantern Festival. The festival is in the first month of Chinese lunar year and it is often in January or February. On the day, people like to eat sweet rice dumplings and go to guess riddles which they can find at the bottom of lanterns. If they get the right answer, the sellers of the Chinese lanterns will give them a gift. To celebrate the Chinese Lantern Festival, I have made my own orange lantern. It has no strips. Instead, it has a wood stick and four red strings to hold at the top. You can write Chinese words on it or you can paint it. Inside of it definitely has orange inner skin; you can also put a candle in it, if you want. For this orange lantern, I used a big orange, some strings, a needle, and a chopstick. The first step was to cut the top of the orange open, and then to take out the orange inside carefully. The second step was to get the needle and string and put it through the peel near the cut and do the other one in the opposite direction. The third step was to get the chopstick and tie the two ends of the two strings together on the stick. The fourth step was to take the excess and string it around the stick to make a knot for extra security, or else the strings might get loose and the lantern might fall. It is fun to eat all of an orange and play with an orange lantern at the same time.