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Happy Lunar New Year, Baltimore! May the Year of the Snake be filled with joy, prosperity, and good luck for you and your loved ones. Among others - such as the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Harbor Point, Seeing Green Studio, Ekiben and Cafe Dear Leon, the Corner Pantry, Baltimore County Public Library, and MGM National Harbor - the Walters Art Museum annually holds a Lunar New Year celebration attended by visitors of all ages for a day of art-making, tours, story time sessions, photo booth fun, food, and more! On February 1, 2025, the Peabody Heights Brewery and the National Association of Asian American Professionals (NAAAP) Baltimore joined forces to celebrate Lunar New Year with a Beer Release: SALAK – Snake Fruit Inspired Beer; Activities: Money Tree, Snakes & Ladders, and Paper Chain Snakes; Performances: Dual Lion Dance and music by Steve Hung; Food: Ekiben; Vendors: Asian owned businesses; Asian-Themed Arcade Games; and Art by Reed Bmore & Jethro Patalinghug.
Lunar New Year is a celebration of the arrival of spring and the beginning of a new year on the lunisolar calendar. It is the most important holiday in China, and it is also widely celebrated in South Korea, Vietnam, and countries with a significant overseas Chinese population. While the official dates encompassing the holiday vary by culture, those celebrating consider it the time of the year to reunite with immediate and extended family.
Lunar New Year is the beginning of a new year based on lunar calendars or, informally but more widely, lunisolar calendars. Typically, both types of calendar begin with a new moon but, whilst a lunar calendar year has a fixed number (usually twelve) of lunar months, lunisolar calendars have a variable number of lunar months, resetting the count periodically to resynchronise with the solar year. The event is celebrated by numerous cultures in various ways at diverse dates. The determination of the first day of a new lunar or lunisolar year varies by culture.
Commonly known as the Spring Festival in China, Lunar New Year is a fifteen-day celebration marked by many traditions. At home, families decorate windows with red paper cuttings and adorn doors with couplets expressing auspicious wishes for the new year. Shopping for holiday sundries in open-air markets and cleaning the house are also traditions. The Lunar New Year’s Eve reunion dinner is the highlight that begins the holiday, a feast with a spread of symbolic dishes, such as a whole fish representing abundance, that bring good luck and fortune. The fifteenth and final day of the holiday is the Lantern Festival, during which people have tangyuan, or sweet glutinous rice balls, and children carry lanterns around the neighborhood at night to mark the end of the celebration.
In the Chinese zodiac, 2025 is the year of the snake. Different regions across Asia celebrate Lunar New Year in many ways and may follow a different zodiac. However, many Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders do not observe the Chinese/lunar zodiac.
After 10 years of advocating for its inclusion by China and other countries in Asia, the United Nations unanimously passed a resolution in 2023 to recognize Lunar New Year (based on the lunisolar Chinese calendar), as a floating holiday, at the 78th session of the United Nations General Assembly. This meant that starting in 2024, UN bodies were encouraged to avoid holding meetings during that day, marking Lunar New Year as the eighth floating holiday that is observed by UN staff internationally.
