All the best for the New Year "Earth Dog"!
The Chinese New Year is the most important public holiday. The exact day on which this holiday is celebrated depends on the lunar and solar phases of the lunisolar calendar. This year, the holiday will be celebrated on Feb. 16 - the year of the "Earth Dog", following the year of the "Red Fire Chicken". The New Year's Day kicks off the Chinese Spring Festival, which officially concludes 15 days later with the lantern festival. For most of the 250 Grenzebach employees of the Shanghai and Jiashan sites, the New Year is a platform for a get-together with family and friends.
A feast with regional delicacies
Grace Chen, the head of the personnel department in Jiashan, for example, starts her travels two days before the New Year driving 1,600 km to Chengdu, her home town in the province of Sichuan. The evening before the New Year Day an opulent meal is shared with family and friends - bacon and sausage are a special delicacy where Grace is from. Midnight is time for fireworks to banish evil spirits. “The Spring Festival is very important and beautiful to me as it is the only time in the year when the whole family really gets together”, says 33-old Grace. The family not only includes her parents and her son, but also aunts, uncles and cousins. On the New Year Day it is a tradition to congratulate everyone in a big group and to wish health and good luck. The children typically ask their parents for money with the sentence "Gong Xi Fa Cai, Hong Bao Na Lai" ("Congratulations and good luck and wealth in the New Year, now please give me the red envelope").
Seven days in the families
Around the New Year, the Grenzebach team in China takes a seven day vacation, from Feb. 15 to Feb. 21. As it is the case for Grace, most of the Chinese Grenzebach employees spend their time with their families in their home towns in the countryside. All over China this holiday is mainly used for traveling. Safe travels in the year of the Earth Dog: The Wuxu is a term of Chinese astrology and describes a certain constellation of celestial bodies. This only happens every 60 years. As a result, the last earth-dog year started back in 1958.
Returning to the present where the Chinese Grenzebach team celebrated back in December. In the closing ceremony for the company year, all colleagues of Grenzebach Shanghai and Jiashan gathered and were able to win lot of prizes in a raffle.
Grenzebach wishes all the best and a happy New Year!
万事如意，合家平安! (Wànshì rúyì, héjiā píng’ān!)
