Folk traditions and customs of the New Year meal vary across China: Northerners eat dumplings, Southerners eat rice dumpling, Nian-Gao; In Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian, Guangdong and other places, people eat Tangyuan, either deep-fried or broiled. In one word, “Customs are different from area to area even if they are located only more than 50 kilometers away from one another.”

Here, I will show you some examples how Chinese people in different regions start their New Year with the first meal.

According to Chinese calendar, this year, Chinese New Year (Spring Festival) is on February 14th, the same date for western Valentine’s Day. Theoretically, these co-incidences should happen every 19 years on average, but the next Spring Festival/V-Day won’t come until 2048, which is 38 years later.

Now Chinese people especially young lovers are facing a dilemma.

Fruit flies like a banana, time flies like an arrow. A year ago, on Jan 7th, 2009, ChinaBlog.cc came online. I’d like to make an annual review here and share some thought about my experience of authoring this blog.

I still haven’t achieved amazing traffic or readership, but at least I have successfully posted continuously for a year, I haven’t abandoned this blog and am making progress. That’s good enough!

This is a video uploaded by Chinese Civilization Channel at youtube.com . This pipa piece is the most viewed one of its 风华国乐 (Grace of Traditional Chinese Music) playlist.

This is just one example of videos uploaded by Chinese Civilization Channel. So far, I found it the best “China” channel on youtube. Since joining youtube on June 19, 2008, in about one year and a half, this channel has uploaded 13,400+ high quality videos organized with 147 playlists. It has attracted 4,400+ subscribers and ~12 million total upload views.

Have you already planned out your gift list for this holiday season? Is your family planning for a trip to China next year and you want to know more about travelling in China? Do you have a junior one who is curious about the “Middle Kingdom”? Or you want to enrich yourself with some music cd / food cookbook of eastern style? Maybe you can try to give some “China” gifts this holiday season. Well, I mean, gifts which are about China, not just “Made in China”