Christmas and New Years in Taipei

Happy Holidays!

We previously blogged about Christmasland in New Taipei City so just wanted to continue on with the holidays season blog posts. In today's blog we'll finish with what we did for Christmas and for calendar New Years and anticipate Chinese New Years (CNY) as that is a really big deal here in Asia.

Christmas
The places that seem to have the most for Christmas are stores and shopping malls.

There's really nothing for western calendar New Years though as everyone is anticipating Chinese/lunar calendar New Years.

The store decorations went right from Christmas decorations to Chinese New Year decorations. Also if you are anticipating a Christmas sale, the time to go would be on Christmas day as the day after all the Christmas things are put away/gone.

However the nexus of calendar New Year's eve celebration is around Taipei City Hall Square and Taipei 101. Phil who has been there in previous years when he hasn't met Linda yet (so no kids!) says people will stake out the good spots 12 hours in advance. The singers they bring in are usually good if you want to check out the concerts (easier if you don't have kids). But our family arrived on New Year's eve so we tried to just live stream the fire works (which didn't work).

Here's the English version of the official site and I think you just have to change the year if you are reading this for 2020 (that or I'll re-post this then):

https://www.newyear2019.taipei/en/index.html

The Chinese New Years celebration is a much bigger deal here and we'll be writing posts for that in the near future. In the meantime, to finish up, here's a bonus Christmas decoration craft you can do with kids helping and you'll find the materials in any grocery/shopping store:

Christmas wreaths without glue - we'll probably re-post for next Christmas

Materials:
Cloth hanger if you don't have access to pliable branches
Decorations - usually around 50-100 NT
Garland - usually 50 - 100 NT depends on length
If your kids are a bit older they can do it themselves or mine just helped with gathering the materials.

Steps - bend the clothe hanger into the circle, ours was already really bent so it wasn't very hard to do with your bare hands. Then wind-up the garland around the hanger, without using glue I stuck the ornaments in between the winding-up process of the garland.

Finished product - Ta da