Why festivals like CNY are important

 

As families gather for the Chinese New Year, they’ll be doing what generations before them did: celebrate relationships.

Festivals are not merely occasions to eat, drink and be merry. Festivals are also not just to honour our culture and traditions; they are to bring people together.

As has often been said, we are social animals and we need to bond with others of our kind. Celebrations, customs and rituals were invented just for that.

They reiterate the fact that people, consciously or unconsciously, long to belong to groups – whether family, community, race or nation. By travelling home from the places where we work, we reconnect not just with our families but our history.

By participating in and reliving the traditions observed by our forefathers and our community for generations, we find a sense of stability and belonging. This results in firmer ties to family, friends, our community and our shared history.

In celebrating a festival, we also hand down the traditions associated with it to our children who share in the rituals and customs. In this way, the traditions and the culture survive.

From experience, we know that by bringing people together, celebrations engender happiness.

Festival celebrations remove boredom and bring freshness to our lives. For most of us, working or school life can be quite stressful. Celebrations provide much needed relief and remove the uncertainty in our lives by providing a sense of structure. We know what the celebration entails and we know we will be with people whom we can trust and whose company we enjoy.

They also open our minds to appreciate others, as in the Ponggal celebration which honours and thanks Nature, including the sun and the cow.

We feel freer, relaxed as we wear new clothes and enjoy ourselves or engage in common rituals. The atmosphere takes on a positive character and we too become more positive in outlook.

Festivals therefore foster unity within our family and serve to enhance community and social cohesion. This is especially so with the festive meal. And no festive meal is as dramatic as the tossing of the yee sang on the eve of the Chinese New Year.

Whoever is at the table – whether family member or friend – participates in tossing the sliced salad and fish with loud shouts and gustatory gusto. I have found that food does taste better if you perform some pre-eating ritual such as this.

I have also found that people tend to be more generous during festive occasions. Perhaps it is because of the optimistic mood or perhaps we decide not to be calculative during such occasions. Giving gifts in the form of the ang pow (red packet containing money), for instance, is part of Chinese New Year celebration.

Gifts form an important part of celebrations of other communities too.

And in today’s world of online activities, festivals take on greater importance because they provide an opportunity to connect in person with family, friends and fellow humans.

Also, research shows that bonding and being connected with other people – especially family and friends – improves our health.

The latest such research on this was done during the Covid-19 pandemic by researchers at the University of Kent, Nottingham Trent University and Coventry University who used self-reported data from more than 13,000 people across 122 countries.

The researchers found that those who had strong bonds with family and even extended groups reported better mental health and wellbeing. And “the greater the number of groups people had strong bonds with, the higher their engagement in health behaviours and the better their reported psychological wellbeing was, with less anxiety and depression”.

They also found that bonding tended to increase health-conscious behaviour such as washing hands and wearing a mask.

Festivals, whether Chinese New Year or Hari Raya Puasa or Deepavali or Ponggal or Christmas or Wesak Day, offer a common space for members of the family and friends to explore and experience their familial or tribal or communal identities.

At the same time, in a multi-religious, multi-racial nation such as Malaysia, festivals can foster greater understanding of each other’s traditions and customs if we adopt an open-minded attitude. The festivals remind us year in, year out of the rich diversity that we have in our midst.

Festivals and celebrations offer us an opportunity to appreciate and even participate in this rich cultural diversity and thereby enhance inter-community understanding and acceptance. We would be foolish to discard or overlook this opportunity to strengthen national unity.

Kong Hee Fatt Choy to those celebrating Chinese New Year. - FMT

The views expressed are those of the writer and not necessarily those of MMKtT.