Traditions

Yes! It's the long-awaited longgggg weekend! Woohooo! A great time to rest the mind and body!

To all those who are celebrating, let me take this opportunity to wish you a Happy Lunar New Year! All the best in the year of the Rabbit! Hong bao na lai! haha..
Talking about that, I will always get the same reply from my friends each year.. "I'm not married yet." Haiya... It reminds me there was once I keep pestering my friend until she really gave me one. A big hongbao somemore! But with nothing inside.. haha! I still remember it was given to me just before we enter the exam hall! I was so excited to receive it cos it was the first time that anyone gave me a red packet! lol.. What's inside doesn't matter of course.

Oh, that reminds me of another matter. Some years ago, a friend of mine told me that when they received hong bao, they can only open them after the 15 days of celebration (something to do with luck iirc). When I asked my other friends recently, they laughed at me (lol) and told me they can open even on the day they received it, just that not in front of the person who gave it. Is the 15 days thingy a custom/tradition no longer practised by most people? My friends also told me that the 'cannot sweep the floor' and 'cannot wash/cut hair' rules are some of the things they no longer practised. These raised an interesting question. Are we losing our customs and traditions? And I'm not referring to the chinese only. From observation, it seems the indians, and surely, the malays, no longer follow strictly the traditions that our forefathers practised in the past. For instance, the spirit of gotong-royong is rarely practised here in Singapore these days. Even when it does, it's not the same as what I observed when I was a child. Is modernization responsible for all these? Or has practicality taken a higher priority in this fast-paced society? One thing for sure, the customs and traditions observed by the different races here have slowly, but surely, declined.

And talking about CNY, I think my niece is surely on her way to become trilingual. She's already quite fluent in her English and Malay, and now, I think she has started to get comfortable with the Chinese language too. All this is thanks to her lessons at her kindergarten, where the language is part of the curriculum. My friends told me that I should get another set of exercise books from the school for myself so that I could learn together with her! Why didn't I think of that? Very good idea indeed! Maybe in time to come, she could tutor me too! haha

That's it for now. Have a lovely weekend! :)