Chinese New Year decorations for sale.   The store was so busy the people in the background are lined up waiting for carts!

Tomorrow is Chinese New Year, or Spring Festival as it is also called, since it marks the beginning of Spring. Firecrackers are bursting everywhere, houses being renovated and swept clean and red banners are decorating doorways. It is a fun and festive atmosphere, though a little hard to sleep at night.

Nearly every corner of the city has pop-up stores, as my kids call them, tents on the side of the road selling firecrackers. We saw three at one intersection! Families will be spending their hard earned money to put on their own firework shows. Single families put on a display as big as the small town that I grew up in did for Canada Day.

I’m just as excited for the promise of Spring as I am for the chance to go shoot off some fireworks.

While the date for Christmas was chosen to help us get through the longest, darkest nights of winter, Chinese New Year welcomes in Spring. We have been told repeatedly by local friends that “Chun Jie”, Spring Festival, will be the end of the cold. With the traditional Chinese calendar structured around seasonal changes we are often amazed by the accuracy and are hoping that the cold will indeed soon be behind us.

I feel wimpy saying this as a Canadian, especially since our friends and family back home say, “Oh that doesn’t sound bad,” when we tell them to temperature here doesn’t drop far below zero.

But there is a big difference. No heat!

I was starting to believe I had become wimpy, thinking that if I found this hard, there was no way I could endure another Canadian winter. Until we went back in February. Yes, it was bitingly cold outside but indoors we were warm and cozy.

Our apartment here is not heated. So when the temperature dips outside, it dips inside too. For the past three months, when the sun sets, we pull on extra layers and cover ourselves with blankets. And on the days when the sun doesn’t show it’s face, we leave those layers on all day. This winter, our apartment reached a low of 11 degrees. Indoors! At that point the simplest of tasks became onerous. We just couldn’t get warmed up. And dinner conversation revolved around how well we could see our breathe.

It’s hard to get into the shower when this is the temperature in the bathroom!

We layer up, especially at night and have even gone to bed with winter hats warming our heads and hot water bottles tucked under our feet. We do have a few space heaters but our walls are cement and have no insulation so they just soak up any heat we pump into the rooms. It’s not that effective. So we have watched what the people around us do and follow some of their ideas for coping with the cold. We shut down the coldest rooms in the apartment and huddle together. And like bears in hibernation, on the coldest days we slow down to conserve energy.

But the celebration of Spring is well underway. We let the kids stay up late last night, knowing they wouldn’t be able to sleep with fireworks exploding for hours. Tonight will be the biggest night. The festivities will likely go all night and even into the dawn and we will be heading out to set off the ones that we bought and watch others. The kids are excited to be a part of the fun!

I love seeing the city decorated in red lanterns, kids having a break from school and smiling faces of manual labourers on their way to the train station, preparing for their long ride home to see their family. For some of them it’s the only time of the year to go home.

I’m not traveling, as most people are. I’m not even making dumplings to symbolize a year of prosperity. I’m sitting here writing. Wearing warm slippers, wrapped in a blanket, drinking tea, and thinking what a wonderful idea it is to have a holiday that celebrates the end of winter. And the beginning of Spring!