Chinese New Year Lanterns

To be completely honest, I sort of have a love-hate relationship with Chinese New Year. Mostly because my birthday hovers around the festival period. So if it was Chinese New Year on my birthday (changes every year according to the new moon in Spring) most of my friends would be busy attending reunion dinners or visiting family during this time – hence not being able to attend my birthday party.

Aside from that, I have very fond memories of Chinese New Year . From visiting my best friend and her family during the festive season, receiving ang paos (red packets with money), watching the fireworks, tossing the yee sang, performing as well as watching the lion dance to having the yummiest tom yum soup steamboat made my best friends mum.

Given that I was having my niece and nephews over and Chinese New Year was just around the corner, I felt it was the perfect opportunity to take a walk down memory lane and make these Chinese paper lanterns with them. I remember making them in school as a child, so I figured they would enjoy it too and that I could teach them a little bit about how we celebrate Chinese New Year back home.

While the boys were excited to watch lion dance videos, my niece was keen to get a move on with making her lanterns. Needless to say they were occupied for a couple of hours and got very into personalising their lanterns – deviating slightly from the design at times.

While I did have another slightly more complicated lantern design, this proved to be the easiest one for the kids to manage by themselves (Ages 5 – 10years) hence me making this video.

All you need is
– Scissors
– A4 paper – you can mix and match different colours
– Ruler
– Pencil
– Stapler
– Glue/Double sided tape (honestly, I regret not having any cause it works just as well with half the mess!)

We certainly had a very hyggelig time making the lanterns and decorating them. Do let me know if you give them a try and if your little ones (even just you) enjoy them!