Doubly Happy Chinese New Year

One of our Chewish goals is to have a gathering to celebrate each of the three New Years: Jan. 1st, Chinese New Year, and Rosh Hashanah.  This weekend, ten days into year 4079, we finally had our Chinese New Year party.  (Better late than never, right?)

I've been busy with work, so we decided we'd order most of the food from a local Chinese restaurant. But there was no way I was going to contract out the funnest part of party prep -- the decor!

The cold temperatures made it difficult to get fresh branches, so I used artificial branches from Pier One for our money tree.  They're so much sturdier than real branches and were perfect for hanging the ornaments I imported from Hong Kong.

I also hauled a ginormous bag of candy from Hong Kong: chocolate coins (like Hanukkah gelt, but with Hong Kong coin denominations); adorable little plastic pineapples, fortune cats, pigs, and gold ingots with chocolates inside; and red firecrackers with little candies inside.

As with Rosh Hashanah, Chinese New Year tradition is to eat lots of sweets.  My mom sent along some peanut and sesame candies from LA, and I added some giant chocolate Pocky.

I made a few simple red tissue poms,

hung a "Happy New Year" pennant, and got a giant paper dragon from the local party supply store.  I started to realize I might have been getting a bit too much into the decorating thing when my husband looked up from his computer and observed that our living room seemed to be shrinking.  What can I say?  I lack self control around pretty things.

Next up: the food.

Are you an over-decorator when it comes to parties?   Come on, surely I'm not the only one who gets a little cray-cray around tissue paper?