On Friday Feb. 21, students came together to celebrate the start of the Lunar New Year from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. in the Lorton Performance Center. The festival was a joint effort on behalf of the Asian American Student Association, the Vietnamese Student Association, the Korean Student Association, the Chinese Student and Scholars Association, and SAB. Their goal was to bring both the campus and larger Tulsa community together to celebrate the new year and learn about the traditions associated with the Lunar New Year. Lunar New Year falls on a slightly different date every year as it follows the lunar calendar, but typically lands between the end of January to February. In 2025, it fell on Wednesday Jan. 25, marking the start of the Year of the Wood Snake in the Chinese zodiac.
The Lunar New Year is a tradition in China that can be dated back over 4000 years, and was traditionally thought of as a time to spend with family and community to welcome the new year, ward off potential bad luck and honor ancestors. This Lunar New Year represents the start of the sixth sign of the Chinese zodiac cycle making it the year of the Snake. In the Chinese zodiac, the Snake symbolizes elegance, wisdom and intuition, and people born in the year of the Snake are believed to be insightful, calm and charming with the Snake generally representing transformation and growth. However, the Lunar New Year is not solely a Chinese practice, as it is an important cultural celebration across East and Southeast Asia. While the event is usually referred to as the “Spring Festival” in China, the holiday is also referred to as “Tết” in Vietnam and “Seollal” in Korea. Throughout, the Lunar New Year is considered by many cultures to be a time of community celebration, renewal and joy.
The festival itself was free to all University of Tulsa students and also open to the Tulsa community. The evening started off with an assortment of food including kimbap, white rice, japchae, tofu, sesame balls and stir-fry. Afterwards, attendees participated in an array of activities upstairs where they could earn raffle tickets for the upcoming drawing. At the calligraphy table, students could earn raffle tickets by writing their name using ink brushes, while another table offered a space for guests to decorate their own red envelopes to take home. There was also an activity table where students could win raffle tickets by participating in the chopstick game, in which they competed against each other to get as many marbles out of one cup into another in thirty seconds, using only chopsticks. Other activities at the festival included VSA’s gambling game, origami snakes and the Wishing Tree.
Shortly after these activities, performances for the festival began. The first presentation, and perhaps the most memorable of the night, was a skit depicting the legend of Nian and the origins of Chinese New Year. In the Chinese legend, Nian, a horned beast, would come out of hiding and terrorize villagers. One day, an elderly man told the villagers the monster was afraid of the color red and loud noises, so the villagers decorated their towns in red and made loud noises and burned firecrackers to scare the monster away, which ultimately ended up working.
After this skit, there were multiple raffle drawings where ten lego sets were handed out, along with multiple rounds of trivia where the audience could participate. Other performances for the night included a traditional Chinese dance, group dances from both members of VSA and KSA, and a performance from the Tulsa Chinese School. The performances ended with the Hung Viet Lion Dance, a cultural expression that wards off bad luck and ushers good fortune into the new year.
