The Year of the Snake arrives on a workday: the shortest festival

The Lunar New Year fell on 29 January this year, a Wednesday, and the timing made the holiday a compressed ritual for most of the country. The trains ran their annual marathon, the stations handled the crowds that they design their architecture around, and the family tables were set in the homes that the travellers had crossed the country to reach; the work schedule, meanwhile, bent around the oldest date on the calendar with the particular awkwardness that a midweek festival produces. The Year of the Snake arrived with the irony that the busiest travel season in the world was also, for many households, the shortest.

The arithmetic of the midweek holiday is worth understanding, because it explains the experience. The official holiday ran for eight days, and the days were arranged, with the usual official adjustments, to give most people a week at home; the arrangement worked on paper, and the experience was shaped by the bookends, the weekend of travel that preceded the festival and the weekend of return that followed it. The travel numbers, released in daily bulletins by the transport authorities, set records on the peak days, and the records were the annual demonstration of a country that moves its population twice in the space of a fortnight. The holiday was short; the travel was not.

The rituals of the festival were performed this year with the particular attention that the compressed schedule produced. The reunion dinner was held, as always, on the eve, and the tables carried the dishes that the region defines as essential; the red envelopes were distributed to the children and the unmarried, and the amounts, the sources report, moved with the same inflation that the economists measure elsewhere; the couplets went up on the doors, the fireworks, in the regions that allow them, filled the sky, and the family photographs, taken at the table with the new phones, filled the albums. The rituals were the same rituals that the festival has always performed; the schedule around them was new, and the newness was the occasion’s particular character.

The Year of the Snake carries its own symbolism, and the symbolism deserves a paragraph in a year that will need the qualities that the animal represents. The snake is the sign of the measured, the patient, the strategic, the creature that moves by indirection and survives by calculation, and the coming year, by the signs already visible in January, would reward those qualities. The festival’s wishes, exchanged over the dinners and the phones, carried the standard blessings, the health, the wealth, the success, and the blessings will be tested in the months ahead, as the year’s events require the patience that the sign promises and the flexibility that the schedule has already demanded.

The holiday ended, as all holidays end, with the return, and the return was the part that the coverage of the festival rarely reaches. The trains filled again, the platforms carried the particular silence of travellers leaving home, and the cities received their populations with the routines that the new year would run. The Year of the Snake arrived on a workday, and the workday was the reminder that the festival is a pause in the year rather than an escape from it; the pause was taken, the tables were set, the family was seen, and the year began, as it always does, with the return to the work that the festival had interrupted. The snake is patient; the year, on the evidence of its first month, will be busy, and the patience will be needed.