Glad the festivities are over

Chinese or Lunar New Year is over,.......... wellll...there are actually 15 days to the new year celebrations but the official public holidays and bulk of visitations are over. The first day of the Chinese New Year (or CNY as I like to refer to it) was 18 Feb and we had the 19th and 20th as public holidays. CNY is celebrated by all Chinese, regardless of religion. This is when families open up their homes to relatives and friends and where food (can be proper lunch or dinner but is usually in the form of snacks, goodies) and the exchange of hong baos (small red envelopes containing money and is for children) feature prominently. There is also the reunion dinner on the eve of the CNY where families adjourn to a relative's house for a huge meal. CNY is a celebration of family but friends are very welcome too. Oh and I forgot to mention that a massive spring-cleaning of the home is generally done before CNY.

My favourite part of CNY is the food, I love all the snacks laid out and that goes double for Brandy. The family and I do not feed her any of these but it is the visitors who 'ooh and aah' over her and then drop tidbits on the floor for her to gobble up. She also loves all the attention. She received lots of pets and was duly applauded when showing off her small repertoire of parlor tricks (shaking hands, sneezing, rolling over). She also ran around with some of the young kids.

This is Brandy all tuckered out last night. Whenever I try to take a closeup of her sleeping, she usually raises her head to look at me or at least opens an eye to see what I'm doing. But there was no head rising or eye opening for her last night, not even a twitch of an eyelid when I snapped the shot.