CNY Celebration - 2 Feb 2008

I had a fun, enjoyable and memorable time working with the CNY committee to prepare for the celebration this year. Of course there was also a little guilt. We had our first meeting two weeks prior but because the nus people had to leave the meeting halfway to attend csc day, the bulk of the planning was left to the rest. So really must thank the rest of the committee for putting in so much effort :)

On that Saturday, we came at 9am and started with putting up the decorations. We wanted to hang some decorations dangling from the ceiling at the back of the hall. It’s at times like this that we wish taller people like boon song and jie hua were around. In the end, shawn managed to help us with the hanging of the decorations while standing on two chairs. Hmmm.. he also said that he and bs were around the same height and so suspected that previously bs also had to make use of 2 chairs to hang the Christmas decorations.

Later, we helped to set up the stations and those involved in the skit had a few rounds of dry run. The time of the start of the celebration drew closer and we were relieved when we saw the whole group of nus people strolling in because most of the other volunteers had already arrived. They arrived as a big group because they had been at nus in the morning attending the volunteer management workshop.

Start of Celebration – Lion Dance

The Lion Dance performance by Kun Ying Wushu & Lion Dance Centre (Anthony managed to get their contact) kicked started the whole programme. Really glad that they agreed to perform for us because CNY celebration would not be complete without lion dance. Some of the residents were afraid of loud noises but am glad that the rest of them seemed to be enjoying themselves.

After that, we proceeded to the games stations.

The Games Stations

Upon arriving at each station, the residents offered the station masters oranges together with auspicious greetings like 身体建康。

We had 9 stations in total because it was supposed to be a free and easy bazaar. I was supposed to get ready the station ‘dress-em-up’. The original idea was to make the residents dress 2 mannequins with CNY clothes and then explain the significance of wearing bright colours. We had to modify the idea though because we realised that the mannequins looked quite obscene without any clothes on. You can actually see the waists and the ribs on the mannequins. Awkward right? So in the end, we had 6 pieces of paper with the words, ‘boy’ ‘girl’ 'red’ ‘blue’ ‘qi pao’ and ‘zhong guo yi’. The residents were then supposed to match the words to the corresponding mannequin.

Justin’s stations looked like the most fun to me. Colourful balls were stuck onto the resident’s clothing using masking tape and they were supposed to shake the balls off. That station is called – ‘shake-a-bon-bon’.

I felt that the concept of the ‘shaker making’ station was really good. The shakers were to be used for the skit later when we would ask them to help make us lots of noise to scare Nian off. They had to count a specific number of red beans, soya beans and stones to be placed into the cans.


'Peel It!' must have been the nicest smelling station because of all those peeled oranges. The skins of the oranges were supposed to be arranged on the premade template. I think they used the inner cardboard cut-out as the template for the ‘peel-it’ station and the outer cut-out for the chinese calligraphy station. Cos if you look at the photos for both stations, they both have the words 大吉大利. Smart right?

Following the games was the concert.


Concert at the Hall

Can’t really describe much about what happened during the concert in the hall because I was downstairs with a few other volunteers setting up the tables for the yusheng and only came up during the ending part. But from what I know, there was a Chinese dance session in which Ying Jie and Dylis demonstrated and had the residents dance together.

And there was Wushu performance by an enthusiastic group of boys from Alwin’s secondary school.

The skit which Yan Ling wrote had Dylis acting as ah girl, Alwin as ah boy, Ying Jie as the mother and Shawn as Nian. I only managed to catch the last part of the skit but have seen them in rehearsals and must say that they act and fit their roles very well.

The friendly heartland cai shen ye cum MC was Yuliang. Nobody took a full body picture of the cai shen ye but yes, he is wearing slippers.

Finale – Yu Sheng Tossing

After the performance, we proceeded back downstairs for the yusheng tossing which was the finale for the day.

As you can see from the Yin-Yang tablecloth, we were short of white trash bags to line the tables so we had no choice but to use black trash bags. In the end, we had one black, one white and one yin-yang table. But I guess no one even noticed.

We even had a mini buffet. They say the brown jelly tastes like milo. The mini green cakes are really yummy. It smells of pandan and has coconut filling.

Yup. That’s all for CNY celebrations 2008 @ MINDSville. Happy Chinese New Year to all!


stella