Luck & Luxury: Get Your Home Ready for Lunar New Year 2024
by Carlisle Homes
Decorate your home for health, wealth, and good fortune this Lunar New Year with these easy and practical tips.
The Year of the Wood Dragon begins this Saturday 10 February 2024 – a time of great celebration in Chinese culture. Preparing your home for the festivities traditionally involves cleaning, sweeping, and decorating to create optimal feng shui, so you can enjoy good health, joy, and prosperity all year long.
Here’s how to embrace the spirit of Lunar New Year and welcome those positive vibes into your home.
Say farewell to the old year by airing your interior, sweeping the dust from floors and corners, clearing away the clutter, and bringing in some auspicious fruit and plants.
Open all your windows and doors
Draw in the new year’s good fortune by throwing open the doors and windows in your home for nine minutes (nine is one of the most auspicious numbers in Chinese culture). This allows fresh air to circulate throughout every room, and lets the energy of the previous year flow out.
Wash your windows
In feng shui, windows represent your eyes – or how you see things. When windows get dirty it can result in blurry vision, which translates to a lack of clarity or a tendency to miss obvious things in your day-to-day life. Now’s the time to clean all your home’s windows so you can clearly see all the opportunities that come your way in the year ahead, and have the clarity to make the right decisions.
Clean your entry area
Your front door is believed to be where all the energy of your life and space comes into your home. Letting clutter and dust pile up around your front door is said to hold negative or stagnant energy, which is the last thing any of us wants as we enter a brand-new year!
If you’ve neglected this area for a while, set aside some time now to give it a proper tidy up. Shake out the front mat, remove any cobwebs from around the door, clean door jambs and your front-door number, wipe down your console table and hallway mirror, and return any shoes or bags that are cluttering up the space to their rightful owners.
Tidy your floors
Sweeping away the old and making room for the new is a traditional Lunar New Year practice. Give floors a thorough clean, making sure to sweep from the inside of your house to the outside, in order to remove bad luck and enjoy a smooth start to the year ahead.
While delicious food, a new set of clothes, and decorating your home with lucky colours are central to Lunar New Year celebrations, you can foster positive energy by doing a good deed too.
Decorate with lucky colours
Red, gold, and yellow are lucky colours in Chinese culture, symbolising wealth, good fortune, and prosperity. Incorporate these beautiful, vibrant hues into your home with red lanterns or placemats, yellow throw cushions or flowers, and touches of gold in small décor pieces.
Do a good deed
Lunar New Year is not only about physical preparations – decorating, food, and gifting – but also about fostering positive energy through actions. Take the opportunity to do something good, whether it’s helping a neighbour, donating to charity, or volunteering your time to a worthy cause. Acts of kindness will contribute to a harmonious and positive atmosphere in your home.
Add some mandarins to your centrepiece
In the Cantonese dialect, the word for mandarin oranges is kam, which sounds like ‘gold’, and these tasty fruits symbolise abundance and good fortune in Chinese culture. So, look to pop a few throughout your decorative displays. Place a handful of mandarins in the centrepiece on your dining table, in a pretty dish on your hallway console table, or on the mantelpiece in your living room.
Bring in a kumquat tree and flowering plants
Kumquat trees are associated with prosperity and wealth, so if improving your finances is a personal goal for 2024, there’s no better time than now to add one to your home – ideally, near your entrance, where it’s said to attract positive vibes. Miniature kumquat trees also make a lovely Lunar New Year gift for friends and family.
Flowering orchids and peonies symbolise rebirth, while a blooming plant on New Year’s Day is said to symbolise a year of prosperity ahead, so take the opportunity to fill your home with greenery and blooms.
Happy decorating, and may the Year of the Wood Dragon bring you and your loved ones wellbeing, success, and joy!
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