Pre-Chinese New Year 2011

Chinese New Year is approaching! The malls that I've been to have been kind and have mixed loud CNY songs with other pop songs so you don't feel like you're going crazy.

This is what greeted me yesterday morning in my office. Done by the same IT guy who did the 7 foot Santa last Christmas. Isn't it sweet?

Then of course there is the usual rush to change old notes for new. Even though where I work is surrounded by so many banks, there was a shortage on smaller denominations as usual. So this is what I managed to get so far. I wonder when it would be socially acceptable to start giving old notes instead of new ones every year.

This year's ang pow packet from my company looks great! I love the matt art paper as opposed to the shiny ones. 

So yeah, we've started packing our red packets already. Rummaging through our old "stocks", I came across this special unopened one. What was a fleeting comment from my friend who said her husband keeps all the ang pows given to him by his grandparents and parents as a souvenier made me keep some too.

This ang pow was the first and last given to me by my grandma since I got married. Every year of my marriage she would ask me to come visit during the 15 days of CNY but I never thought of the significance of it for the first five years. After all, I would see her during our reunion dinners two days before the first day of CNY. Last year, we took more leave and made the effort to go visit her, not knowing it would be her last. So yeah, this was the very ang pow she gave me then. Although I wasn't very close to her, but I feel her absence quite strongly this time of the year.

So this year, we really need to make the effort to treasure all our loved ones, not just during CNY but as frequently as we can.

Ok, ok, this post is meant to focus on CNY stuff. Our office is overwhelmed with the number of mandarin oranges and hampers that appear almost on a daily basis. So blessed!

Some came in cute baskets like this:

Some hampers had beautiful must-keep stuff like these porcelain blue and white ceramic tea containers (yes Ron, the same ones like you bought).

Some hampers were creative like this yee sang pack, one for each of the team.

Yesterday, we received a strange looking greeting card, filled with stickers from our creative agency.

This is how you assemble it:

Cute giler!

It is brilliant! Create your own Righteous Rabbit with the stickers given, pose it with the greeting card or in any creative way, snap a photo and post it up on the given Facebook site and the 10 most liked photo will win a Yes 4G dongle (high speed internet)! Mandarin oranges are aplenty and it really is up to your creativity to do this.

Well, that's it so far. I'll update if there are any more interesting things for pre-CNY.