A lot of people gathered at the Lakeforest Shopping Center in Gaithersburg, on the outskirts of the U.S. capital of Washington, D.C., on Saturday, on the eve of China's Lunar New Year, or "Spring Festival" as it is called by the Chinese.

"What's Spring Festival? I've never heard of that," said Joan F. Stern, deputy majority whip of the Maryland House of Delegates.

Stern said she had been to the Lunar New Year celebrations at the Lakeforest Shopping Center for several years, which featured a variety of performance including paper cutting, wushu (martial arts), guzheng (Chinese music), calligraphy demonstration and a series of exhibitions, but no one had told her that Lunar New Year is also called Spring Festival.

This is the seventh time that the Maryland-based Chinese Culture and Community Service Center (CCACC) has sponsored Lunar New Year celebrations with the Lakeforest Shopping Center, which have attracted more and more visitors, both Chinese and Americans.

Mark Wisniewski, who lives about an hour's drive from Baltimore, was one of those visitors to the celebrations.

Wisniewski said this was his first time to the celebrations, mainly for the sake of his three-year-old daughter, Amelia, whom he and his wife adopted in China two years ago.

"I like Chinese culture, that's why we went to China to adopt a child," he said.

Wisniewski, who was at the celebrations with his wife, daughter and parents-in-law, said he would surely come to see Lunar New Year celebrations at the shopping center in the future. "We are planning to adopt another child in China," he said.

Wisniewski said he knew that the Lunar New Year of 2006 starts on Jan. 29, and celebrations end 15 days later, marked by the Lantern Festival, and nothing more. But he added that he would learn more about Chinese culture.

Like Wisniewski, many Americans know about the Lunar New Year, and the year of 2006 is the Year of Dog. But for many, their knowledge of the Lunar New Year and other Chinese festivals barely goes beyond that.

Nevertheless, more and more Americans begin to know about the Lunar New Year, and celebrations at the Lakeforest Shopping Center surely helped those present there form an idea about what the Lunar New Year is.

In Maryland's Montgomery County, which abuts on Washington, D.C., the Lunar New Year has been designated as an official holiday for Asian Americans, and in the state, more than 70 delegates have jointly sponsored and introduced a bill calling for the designation of the Lunar New Year as an official holiday for the state's Asian Americans.

The House of Delegates was holding hearing on the bill, and was likely to vote on it in February, Stern said. It was highly likely the bill would be passed as over half of the delegates were cosponsors, she added.

Source: Xinhua