The Spring Festival is celebrated not only in China but also in other parts of the world. The traditional holiday is the most important to Chinese both home and abroad.

    United Kingdom

    Celebrations for Spring Festival in the UK started in 1980, with the first evening party held in 2002. Every New Year, people get together and have a lot of activities. They sing songs, dance to music, share photos with friends or enjoy films in a cinema.

    United States

    Spring Festival has become a key time for Chinese living or working in the US. They join in a large evening party to welcome the traditional New Year. It is a good chance for people to build a circle of friends and feel that they are not alone because they share the same culture and values.

    Australia

    The Chinese New Year will be welcomed with three weeks of celebrations across Australia. Many people come to Sydney's Chinatown or Little Bourke in Melbourne. They enjoy fireworks, lion dances, dragon boat races and many other traditional activities. The celebrations are also a bridge towards better understanding between Chinese and non-Chinese.

    Singapore

    The family dinner on New Year's Eve is an important tradition for Chinese whether they were born in Singapore or moved there from China. They place traditional food on a table as an act of remembering their past. Then the whole family enjoy their dinner together. They usually hold it at home because having it in a restaurant takes away the meaning of the tradition.

    Do you know Roma people? They were called Gypsies(吉普赛人) by Europeans because they thought they came from Egypt(a country in Africa). About a thousand years ago, the Roma people left their homeland. They are known as nomads because for hundreds of years many of them have lived in large groups that travel from place to place. They have no real homeland.

    Today, the Roma are now living all over the world. They have kept their language and many customs. For example, it's important for Roma to marry other Roma. It's also a custom for parents to choose the person their children will marry. Roma people get married when they are young, sometimes even as young as 14.

    Romany is the language of the Roma people, which was written down only recently. Because the Roma are nomadic and have moved all over the world, their language has developed in many different ways. It is sometimes hard for Roma in one part of the world to understand Roma from another part.

    Roma music is famous all over the world, because many Roma throughout history have been musicians. Their music has influenced many other kinds of music, like classical and jazz.

    Roma don't usually assimilate(同化) into host countries. Over many centuries, governments have forbidden them to marry each other, travel or wear their traditional bright clothes. They have their gold taken away from them—treasures (财富) from their parents and grandparents. They have been taken as slaves(奴隶), and have been forced to change their names.

    But today, the Roma are finding ways to live in peace with others while keeping the treasures of their culture. "There's a will within us to continue to live as a people," says George Kaslov, whose family arrived in New York from Russia a hundred years ago. "All the other ethnic(种族) groups who came to America assimilate gradually with time going; they lose their customs and language. But not the Roma. We hold out."