Everything you need to know about Chinese New Year around the world

Chinese New Year, often called Lunar New Year in South-East Asia, isn’t a single evening but a festival, known as the Spring Festival, that runs for 15 days and is celebrated by 2 billion people.

It falls anywhere between late January 21 and February 20 and the Spring Festival concludes with the appearance of the full moon, marked by the Lantern Festival, which is on March 3 this year.

The Year of the Horse arrives this year, with a pop of firecrackers, on Tuesday.

The first week of Spring Festival is a public holiday in mainland China, with everyone on the move. Crowds are immense and hotel and restaurant prices soar. If you want to plunge in, book hotels and domestic flights long in advance, and avoid train travel.

On New Year’s Eve, tune into CMG New Year’s Gala, the world’s most-watched television show. All Chinese cities have festival markets and fireworks.

Elsewhere, public holidays last only two or three days. You’d be best experiencing Spring Festival in Singapore, Taiwan or Hong Kong, where traditional and religious observances are more prominent.

Be aware that shops are jammed in the lead up to New Year’s Eve and closed for a couple of days thereafter. Many small family businesses and restaurants also close down, but tourist facilities continue as normal.

If you want to experience Spring Festival without citywide crowds and disruptions, Melbourne and Sydney have major celebrations, as do Chicago, London, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Vancouver and Yokohama.

Spring Festival has its origins in religious ceremonies aimed at good harvests, the banishment of evil spirits and ancestor worship. Each day is set aside for certain activities, such as visiting parents, honouring ancestors or giving temple offerings. Buddhist and Daoist temples are very lively and visitors are always welcome.

Spring Festival is focused on family events, the most important of which is a banquet on New Year’s Eve. That perhaps makes it difficult to join in, but you could enjoy your own restaurant banquet if you book well in advance.

Traditional New Year’s dishes to order include fish, dumplings and sticky rice cake, plus abalone, oysters and noodles, the latter representing longevity. Avoid tofu, since white is associated with mourning.

If you’re invited to a celebration, appropriate gifts are tangerines (a symbol of friendship), red dates (prosperity) and lychees (harmony). Flowers such as plum blossoms and water lilies are associated with Spring Festival. Little pots of bamboo or miniature kumquat trees are other traditional presents.

Red represents good luck and happiness. Doors are hung with strips of red paper with prayers or poems and the Chinese characters for “spring” and “luck”. If you’re visiting a family, handing children a little money in a red envelope is a nice gesture. You can buy the envelopes at most Asian grocery stores.

Beyond family get-togethers, there will be plenty to enjoy, such as parades, food markets, dragon-boat racing, beauty pageants, dancing lions and dragons and special events in theme parks. The noisy fireworks, firecrackers, drums and cymbals scare away ghosts and evil spirits.