Chinese New Year celebrations end with the Lantern Festival. Since this is the year of the pig, many of the lanterns are a pig's likeness. These lanterns are at the LongShan Temple in Taipei. There are many others all over Taipei City and they are brightly lit in the evenings. But originally the festival was staged so that young women of an age to marry could go out onto the streets in the evening to attract any possible suitors. They would rinse their faces in water reflecting moonlight (so their faces were bathed in the beauty of the moonlight) and then pull some spring onions (for luck?) and then parade through the streets carrying decorative lanterns that they had created. At the temples, now people of all ages visit the lanterns and walk under ones decorated with luck synbols to obtain luck for the new year. LongShan Temple is an unusual one because it is both Buddhist and Daoist so it contains gods of both. While Daoist traditions include meat offerings, since Buddhists are traditionally vegetarians, this temple is vegetarian. When you prayed to the gods, you had to be sure to include your name, birthdate and address to make sure that the god bestowed his/her favor on the correct person.

I didn't walk under any lanterns or pray to any of the gods in the temple. I followed another tradition for luck...you aren't suppose to sweep the floor on New Year's Day because you might sweep away your luck for the year. As I am not a big fan of housework, I really like this tradition and plan to follow it every year, for both the calandar new year and the lunar new year.