The red-Starbucks-cup, jingles-in-pharmacies, wrapping-paper-raffle holiday season may have ended on Jan. 1, but for the more than five million Americans of Asian descent who celebrate Lunar New Year, the stretch of holidays isn’t quite over. For many, one of the most important holidays of 2021 falls on Friday, Feb. 12 — a coincidence some have termed Lunar New Year Shabbat.
Lunar New Year — so called because it marks the first new moon of the East Asian traditional lunisolar calendar — is traditionally celebrated in China as a 15-day affair, usually beginning with a family feast on New Year’s Eve and ending with the Lantern Festival, which honors deceased ancestors. Although in the U.S., Lunar New Year is often conflated with “Chinese New Year,” the day is also celebrated in other countries – including Singapore and Vietnam.