Happy Chinese New Year!

A very happy Year of the MOUSE (I hate saying 'rat') to everyone! Chinese New Year is a time of much celebration and family'ness. I remember when I was 10 and we were living in Taiwan at the time, there were different traditions for the first 3 or 4 days of the new year. For example, on the first day, I believe families go visit the mother's side of relatives. I'm not so sure after that, but I do know that a lot of firecrackers, yummilicious food, burning paper money and, of course, red envelopes with money. But living on this side of the world, we don't have any extended family really close by (closest are cousins up in Canada and they're really sick and contagious) so there's not much celebration going on at my house; we just went out to dinner and got our red envelopes (although I'm technically too old to be receiving any) and hung out at home.