6/2/2008 - Eve of a Prosperous New Year

I was wondering: Where's the Chinese New Year spirit? Where's the sense of excitement, the lucky prosperous feeling that is supposed to be Chinese New Year-ish?

Today's the Eve and we just had our reunion dinner, a Chinese equivalent to guai lo's Thanksgiving. I felt it was rather low key, and well...ordinary. Where's the festive feeling? It felt like just another dinner day with my dad, mom, sis and brother.

Then as I turned on the red lanterns outside my house, a thought hit me. I realized: It felt 'ordinary' tonight because throughout the year, all of our dinners at home had that family-festive ambience anyway. Every dinner was just as lavish as the one we had on our table tonight. Every dinner was just as cheerful and joyful as the one we had tonight. There were always laughs, silly jokes and light-hearted discussion accompanying the usual 5-dish,1-soup dinner that my dad could magically whip up in an hour or two. Then after dinner, we would usually gather in the living room to watch TV, eat dessert or drink juices, talk and discuss about our lives, eat fruits, talk about the silly people on TV, eat ice-cream, gossip about other silly people in our workplaces - all in the same evening (not necessarily in that order) as Wah Lai Toi aired one HK drama after another.

The only difference today was that we had 7 dishes and 1 soup, twice as much goofing around between my siblings and I at the dining table, my sister sang CNY songs instead of her usual favourite Jewel numbers, and there were fireworks popping outside.

So what does that mean?

Oh My God of Prosperity! We are actually celebrating Chinese New Year every single day!

Yes. We are blessed to be able to bring such festive spirit to the dinner table as an everyday thing. So much so, these happy, prosperous feelings had been made as a given, a natural thing. If dinners are any time quiet and there aren't any jokes between us, that would mean something was off.

And, since it's an everyday thing, we tend to take all this this for granted. I know I did or I wouldn't have wondered about the absence of CNY spirit. Because it was always there, I didn't notice it anymore. Like a fish asking "where's water?" Yes, it's completely absurd.

But this year, for the first time in all of my 28 celebrations of CNY Eves, I finally jumped out of the bowl, and saw the water.
And I was like ooohh...whoaaa...the God of Prosperity (Choi San Yeh) had been with us all the time! First there's the abundance of food, the sturdy roof over our heads and the healthy bodies to enjoy all of it. Then there's the abundance of love - one that we experience as a family sharing our daily lives together: the closeness, the unity, the intimacy, the joy. In the book of Family Prosperity, that pretty much sums up the main ingredients to prosper ala heaven-on-earth style. Everything else in between are only more of the Divine's generous toppings, spices and garnishes to make life tastier.

So it's funny now, how we go onto auto-complain mode about why Prosperity Yeh Yeh wouldn't choose our house (we KNOW because we didn't strike any of the Magnum 4D, Toto and Lottery numbers we bought). Hence, autopilot again, we start doing all sorts of prayer rituals with a smorgasbord of oranges, chickens, joss-sticks, sticky glutinous rice, pink coloured cakes, etc..to entice...I mean..to invite The Almighty Prosper over, so he could drop by with some of his gold ingots (he's like the Santa Claus of the East, you see, but we prefer cash over plastic toys).

How completely absurd, yet again, to think Prosperity can be bought, when we already have it in the first place! Haha. Yes I laugh now, but I have been in that kind of absurdity for more than 2 decades.

So today it's not so much of a reunion dinner to get the entire Wong clan together so we can wish everyone more Prosperity; but really a celebration of the close union we have always had as a family and to give thanks for the abundance we experienced all this time.

So forget the formalities, conventionalities and superficialities of Eve's Reunion Dinners (it really takes away the fun, trust me) and instead dive right into the heart of it and embrace the spirit of love, abundance and gratitude that lives in this spiritual day. Then let this energy flow into your New Year and empower the entire year. If you ask me, that's what true prosperity is really all about.

Happy Chinese New Year to everyone, and may you find your God of Prosperity within you...

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