CNY

Today is Chinese New Year. We celebrated this past weekend with my family. We did our traditional thing of getting together to make dumplings shaped like gold ingots. Unfortunately, it was hard this year to coordinate everyone's schedule so it was mainly just us and my mom making all the dumplings. My brother got there towards the end to help. It was a lot of work but I love it and look forward to it every year.

Unfortunately, it's a lot of work for my mom too and she is just getting too old and tired to do it all now and we will either have to step it up and do most of the work or it will quickly disappear as another lost tradition. Along with the dumplings, my mom made taro and daikon cake even before we got there.

That's not even including the big dinner which included beef, bbq pork, chicken, shrimp, fish and a couple different vegetables. There is some symbolism to all the different foods prepared for New Year's but I don't really know most of them. And believe it or not, when my dad still helped out, we had a lot of other kinds of dim sum and dishes too.

Now it's just my mom doing the cooking and although we did what we could to help out, she still did the bulk of it on her own and she was simply exhausted by the end of the night. If nothing changes next year, I'm afraid we are just going to end up at some chinese restaurant next year with the rest of the masses.

The good thing is that our girls are getting old enough to be of real help in making the dumplings now so  hopefully we can carry on the tradition nevertheless.