EVERY year the Spring Festival holiday triggers one of the world's largest migrations as Chinese from all over the globe head for home to join family and friends to celebrate the most joyous holiday of all.

To Chinese, the Spring Festival is all about family reunions and visiting relatives and friends. The evening before the Spring Festival, the lunar New Year's Eve, is an important time for family reunions.

The whole family gets together for a sumptuous dinner, followed by an evening of conversation or games. Some families stay up all night, "seeing the year out."

In the past, when the Chinese used the lunar calendar, the Spring Festival was known as the "New Year." It falls on the first day of the first lunar month, the beginning of a new year. After the Revolution of 1911, China adopted the Gregorian calendar. To distinguish the lunar New Year from the Western New Year, the lunar New Year was called the Spring Festival (which generally falls between the last 10 days of January and mid-February).

It is recorded that Chinese started to celebrate the lunar New Year from about 2000 B.C., though the celebrations were held at different times under different emperors. People started to celebrate Chinese New Year on the first day of the lunar calendar based on Emperor Wu Di's almanac of the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D. 220).

Legend says the celebrations of Chinese New Year may be related to a beast known as Nian.

The beast Nian came out to eat people on New Year's Eve until an old man, actually an immortal god, found a way to conquer it.

The old man told people to put up red decorations on their windows and doors at each year's end to scare away Nian in case he came back since Nian lived in fear of the color red.

To scare away Nian, people started celebrating the New Year by putting up red paper and lighting firecrackers.

They say "guo nian" which mean both "survive Nian" and "celebrate the year." The word "guo" in Chinese means both observe and pass over. People also wear bright clothing to attract the god of the universe, who is supposed to come back at the beginning of the New Year.

Editor: Wing