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tray with all kinds of goodies & sweet treats inside. The candy tray practically is used for holding candies & snacks and it also just looks great for decoration as well. Inside the box there are many dividers, usually it consists of 6 to 8 little compartments. It is like a Japanese Bento Box. It can be in many different shapes, the most common one is round. Each divider holds one kind of snack. Sweet crackers, dried fruit, lotus seeds, watermelon seeds and different kinds of candies will be stocked inside. This red box is used to serve munchies for friends & families coming over during the first week of Chinese New Year holiday. During the first couple weeks of the New Year, we go visit around friends, relatives and families.

All kinds of snacks and yummy treats in this candy tray have to relate to something good and each of them symbolizes the fortune it brings. When I was little, this is one of the joy I used to look forward to during the Chinese New Year. When going around to visit relatives & families, it is fun to find out what each family puts in their candy tray. We get all kinds of goodies in there.

The candy tray usually is red but the color and shape may vary. Red means good luck and good fortune in Chinese culture.

Chinese New Year gets better when we go around visiting relatives and friends, as a kid, we get "Lei Si" (Red Packet) and that is our lucky money.

Our wallets get fat from collecting the Red Packets. This is the kind of fortune and the real "gold" to me!

Since I have started the family, even residing here in Atlanta, I very much wanted to keep the Chinese tradition and to teach my daughters the Chinese cultural activities. We have been going out to this Chinese New Year celebration every year for the past 5 years.

At the Chinese Cultural Center in Atlanta, they usually host a 2-day festival for the Chinese New Year celebration.

This year- 2009, the Year of Ox started on Monday, January 26. The Atlanta Chinese Community Center hosted the festival on Saturday, January 31 and Sunday, February 1. The event was awesome and FUN!

The festival includes an indoor event taking place inside the Chinese Cultural Center where they had many food stands selling authentic Chinese food. And they also displayed a lot of arts & crafts and calligraphy demonstration. On-stage music and dance performance were available at different time schedules throughout the day as well. At the outdoors, around 12:00 noon, it comes the major performance - the dragon dance and the lion dance at the parking lot right in front of the Chinese Community Center. There used to be some martial arts performance, or Tai Chi class demonstration afterwards in some years ago, but this year there was not much going on after the lion and dragon dance. The dragon was still very active and busy going all over the place to visit each merchant, restaurant, business to boost up the festivity.

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