When is Chinese New Year in 2018 and What Does the Year of the Dog Represent?
Chinese New Year can be a really fun time if you live somewhere with a strong Chinese community. The elaborate celebrations are full of beauty and tradition, and lots of colors.
When is Chinese New Year?
Like a lot of holidays in both the east and the west, for example, Easter, Passover, and Ramadan, Chinese New Year is a holiday that isn't on a fixed date like Christmas, but which falls on a different date each year based on the lunar calendar. You can check out Calendar Craze to see when moving holidays such as Texas Independence Day will occur each year. Chinese New Year can fall at any time between January 21st and February 20th, meaning there is a month-long window. In 2018, Chinese New Year will be quite late, falling on February 16th.
The Year of the Dog
If you have ever celebrated Chinese New Year before, or researched about it, you will probably know that the Chinese have a zodiac much like Western astrology. However, it has different signs. In Chinese astrology, each year has an animal from the Chinese zodiac assigned to it, including the horse, the tiger, the rooster, and so on. The years follow a cycle through the 12 signs, which repeats. The Chinese zodiac has been linked to the New Year since ancient times – somewhere in the period between 771 and 476 BC.
2018 is the year of the dog. 2019 will be the year of the boar. If you were born after Chinese New Year in 1982 or 1984 then the dog is your sign too (if you were born before Chinese New Year in those years, your sign is the rooster).
About Chinese Astrology
At first glance, Chinese astrology may seem like a bit of a useless system, as it would appear that it assigns the same personality traits to everyone born in a given year. You only have to look at the people in your year when you were at school to see that clearly, people born in the same year do not really share any similarities automatically, beyond environmental ones around popular culture and what was going on in the world while they were growing up.
However, Chinese astrology does go deeper than that, just as there is more to Western astrology than just your sun sign. Your zodiac sign is calculated along with elements and other variables to give a more unique and individual reading. Additionally, the Chinese zodiac view of the animals represented is slightly different from the Western view, so while we might see a pig, a chicken or a rat as bad animals to be compared to, this is not how it is seen in Chinese tradition.
About The Dog
Those who have the dog in their charts are supposed to embody the good qualities of a dog – loyalty, particularly – however, they are also said to have traits that one wouldn't normally associate with dogs, such as introversion, great intelligence, and a vivid and creative imagination.
Were you born in the Chinese year of the dog? Do you follow Chinese astrology? Let us know in the comments!
