Holidays and Observances:

1: New Year's Day.

8: Laba Festival (8th day of the 12th lunar month) on which porridge made with cereals, beans, nuts and dried fruit is traditionally served.

23: Preliminary Eve/Little New Year (23th of the 12th lunar month). According to legend, the kitchen god delivers reports on families to the Jade Emperor of Heaven. To induce the kitchen god to speak favorably, people traditionally offer sacrifices of candy or sweet, sticky cake to him.

26: World Leprosy Day observed annually on the last Sunday in January.

30: Lunar New Year's Eve, the last day of each lunar year. It includes such traditional activities as pasting New Year's couplets on doorframes and New Year's pictures on doors or walls, offering sacrifices to ancestors, having a family reunion dinner, staying up to see the old year out and usher in the new, and giving children gifts of money.

Blacksmith's Day, an annual celebration of the Jino ethnic group in southwest China, held on a day selected by the clan chief during the 12th lunar month. One member of each family in the village is selected to go hunting, bringing back a pair of bamboo rats for the blacksmith and other game for the clan chief. Bamboo rats are an important food source for the Jino; and the rodents are honored as representatives of ancestors by the Blang, another southwestern group.

31: Spring Festival (Chinese New Year's Day), 1st of the first lunar month, three days off.