新年好 / 新年好 - Happy New Year!

- February 23, 2015

Don your red dresses! Southern California is hosting the biggest public events for the Lunar New Year in the U.S. We celebrate the Year of the Goat or Sheep, depending on how you interpret "yang". We consider ourselves lucky to have such easy access to so many exciting, public, global events right in our backyard! What an inspiration!

New Year Lion/©Caruso Affiliated

You can't miss it. Increasingly every year, Los Angeles is really getting into the mood! Our malls - here the beautiful Grove - feature lanterns, dragons and wishing trees.

The Grove Central Street with Lantern/©Marion Renk-Rosenthal

The God of Wealth/©Caruso Affiliated - hank you to Caruso Affiliated for sharing the photos!

Get in the mood! Here some pointers:

Those born in 1919, 1931, 1943, 1967, 1979, 1991 or 2003 are goats, who can count their lucky colors as brown, red and purple.

Their characters are supposedly kind and peaceable, Creative, thoughtful, frank and honest while their best months are supposedly August and November and their lucky flowers are primroses and carnations.

Children born this year have good chances of becoming pediatricians, actors, daycare teachers, interior designers, florists, hair stylists, musicians, editors, illustrators or art history teachers.

Seeing this list, we assume that many children born in the Year of the Goat may join the event industry!

If you want to get your kids involved in the celebration give them a little money in a red envelope. It's good luck! By the way: only unmarried people get lucky red envelopes and only married people give them out.

Red clothing and fireworks are ubiquitous. The reason is the mythical monster at the center of New Year's, Nian. Nian is supposedly scared of the color red and of fireworks, so chasing the monster away is essential to a good start into the new year.

Chinatown in Downtown Los Angeles and Costa Mesa, Orange County are hosts to the two biggest official celebrations.

Chinatown shut the streets on Saturday, February 21st for the 116th Annual Golden Dragon Parade and Chinese New Year Festival.

Orange County's Vietnamese Community took over the OC Fairgrounds for a 3-day long celebration for Tết Nguyen Dan, organized by the non-profit Union of the Vietnamese Student Associations of Southern California.

It was an explosion of color, music, dance and parades - and a little global excursion just a few miles from our homes.