The representative red ribbons and banners have adorned the halls of WA yet again this year, bringing in cheery crowds, music, noise and commotion, every corridor of WA was crammed with something different and interesting to experience as the festival began, marking the celebration of the 2025 Spring Festival, and the beginning of the year of the snake.
Last year, Asian Culture Club (ACC) celebrated their second consecutive Lunar New Year event after the COVID-19 pandemic, with the event proving to be a major success. This year, Ying Ma was hired as WA’s new Mandarin teacher and ACC advisor and organizer for the Lunar New Year celebration, making for a different, and potentially challenging event setup for ACC. The celebration was held on the night of February 8.
Generally, in China, the festival is celebrated over an entire week, when people visit their families and contribute to the festivities all whilst not having to work for the entire week. ACC’s all-in-one event does it’s best to capture all of the highlights of a traditional Spring Festival celebration.
The event, an all-inclusive experience, offered a series of opportunities to experience and celebrate Chinese culture. The event kicked off at 4:00 p.m. with a collection of vendors, informational booths, and performances, all located in the main gym. Some attractions were open to attendees, including ping pong tables, drums, and interactive booths and stations with small games to play.
The gym was perpetually busy and remained open throughout the night with a continual queue of performances to keep the entertainment flowing, from local dance performances, with many displays from Angel Dance Company, to arts and crafts stations run by student volunteers where attendees could sit down and craft lanterns out of paper or make origami. Other events in the gym included a demonstration by the local martial arts group, World Class Martial Arts, and previews of some other shows that would be happening later in the night during the performance in the Performing Arts Center (PAC).
At 5:00 p.m. the cafeteria was opened to attendees with tickets. The cafeteria was hardly recognizable from its usual appearance during school hours, each table covered with a red table cloth and lanterns hanging from the ceiling with a balloon arch as the room’s center piece. Near the usual lunch lines, volunteers helped dish out catering from a local Asian restaurant, Sichuan Palace. Many of the guests remarked that the food was their favorite tradition of the night.
“My favorite Lunar New Year tradition is eating really good food especially since the food that we got is from an authentic Asian restaurant,” ACC President Jada Promlee said. “[Another one of my favorite parts] was also how everyone was so intrigued in the gym because we had more activities.”
One of the dishes that was particularly mused was the braised beef.
“For me, [my favorite part of the meal] has got to be the beef,” Sophomore Leo Huang said. “It was so tender, flavorful, sour, salty, and aromatic.”
Throughout the meal, a portion of the raffle ticket winners were announced, awarding various prizes, coupons, and various gifts.
Finally, the night closed off with performances from local Asian traditional dance companies, martial arts academies and other types of performers. The PAC was nearly full and the shows proved an exciting and interactive and high-spirited end to the night. Additionally, the performance was marked by intermittent pullings of the final raffle tickets.
Although the events produced an overall successful celebration, the work that went on behind the scenes to pull off such a festival had it’s admissible strains.
“This year, we had a bit of a complication with who would be managing the gym, and I think next year we want more people to help out, instead of only having the cabinet plan,” Promlee said. “Having these new ideas would really benefit the event as other people would know how to improve [it].”
This is all not to mention the entire change in administration, which, according to Promlee, resulted in a responsibility and control shift towards the students, forcing them to take on much more of initiative when it came to running the event.
“It’s very hard for me, because it’s my first year, and it’s my first time in charge of this very big celebration, [but I have] the help of the ACC and a bunch of volunteering parents of Westford,” Mandarin teacher and ACC advisor Ying Ma said. “Also, I am very grateful for the school administrators too, who got in charge of the custodians, the cafeteria, the fire station, and the police station. It’s not me [who is] responsible for these things, it’s very good teamwork.”
Not only did these student and parent volunteers help set up the event, throughout the celebration the volunteers took up many different jobs, from running tables in the gym, serving food at dinner, or even performing in the shows at the end of the night.
