Tag Archives | New Year

Celebrating Zanzibar’s Mwaka Kogwa

Have you booked your ticket yet to travel to Zanzibar to celebrate Mwaka Kogwa? Well, why the heck not…?In class we celebrate Mwaka Kogwa, a joyous, several day long Zanzibari festival that marks the arrival of Nairuz, the new year on the Shiraz (Persian, now Iranian) calendar. The most extensive Mwaka Kogwa festivities take place in Makunduchi, on the southeastern coast of Zanzibar, but wherever you celebrate Mwaka Kogwa, definitely hit each other with banana stems.

Tran Quang Hai’s Coin Clappers

“Hai Hoa” is Vietnamese farming song, sung about the flower harvest.


When we sing the song in our classes we “pick” our children as flowers, putting colored scarves over their heads, clapping and singing and harvesting all. Colorful flowers — brilliant yellow, orange and red blossoms — are an essential symbol of renewal and good luck during Vietnamese Lunar New Year celebration of Tet. Flower farms in Vietnam prepare all year for the December harvest in advance of the February holiday. While we’re not singing this Vietnamese farming song ourselves we can enjoy the heck out of this video of Tran Quang Hai’s exciting version, performed on the coin clappers.

Celebrate the New Year like a Lion

The Chinese New Year lion dance is one of the most exhilarating ways to celebrate the holiday. 
Chinese New Year–often called Chinese Lunar New Year although it actually is “lunisolar”–is the most important holiday in China. It’s a two week long celebration marked by gift-giving, food-sharing, firecracker-cracking and much joyful celebration. The festival traditionally takes place at the end of winter and marks not only a start of a new year, but the impending coming of spring. The festival is full of jubilant dancing, often performed in the streets by trained dancers in colorful costumes. For example, as you see in this video, in the Chinese New Year lion dance, two performers hidden inside the brightly-colored costume of a lion perform a choreographed, martial arts-like series of steps.