On Feb. 13, 2025, the Chinese Culture Club and Mandarin teachers organized a Lunar New Year festival for Middleton High School (MHS) students and the local community. The event featured various booths, such as boba tea, calligraphy and face painting. Many students and families came together to enjoy this cultural celebration.
Celebrating the Lunar New Year is important to students in the Middleton community for a variety of reasons.
“It’s important to celebrate other people’s cultures and to respect them and celebrate them and you can have fun, even if it’s not in your own heritage, you can celebrate other peoples because it’s a nice thing to do,” said Rune Balge, who was the festivals’ photographer.
Connor Peterson, a Mandarin student at MHS, appreciated for the Lunar New Year celebration. “I think [Lunar New Year] is really good at connecting the community and sharing a culture that is sometimes overseen by everybody,” Peterson said.
His words highlight how the festival helped foster cultural awareness and bring people together. Marlee Pavleski, a Mandarin student at MHS who attended the festival, said she was inspired to take Mandarin by the language teachers.
“They were very welcoming at my middle school and also a lot of my friends were taking [Mandarin],” Pavleski said.
“I like art and I also feel like it has to do a lot with making kids happy,” Pavleski said when asked why she decided to volunteer for the face painting booth.
In addition to students, the Chinese Language and Culture Club leadership has had a lot of experience with activities involving Chinese culture and played a key role in planning this event.
Sade Johnson, the club’s Social Media Manager, likes this festival because they think it brings a lot of communities together to have fun..
“Well, I haven’t been to China and I don’t have the most deep, extreme [experience] with Chinese culture[…]but I’d say [Lunar New Year] is a pretty fun event,” Johnson said when asked about the authenticity of the festival.
Maggie Babel-Co, the club’s Vice President, had many insights about the Lunar New Year festival. Babel-Co found that this festival has helped her feel closer to her culture as a person of Chinese descent.
She also highlighted the many differences between the MHS Lunar New Year celebration and the traditional festivals held all around East Asia.
“Well, in China it’s just a longer event,” Babel-Co said. “But in China, they have days off of work and they’ll just not do anything. They’ll do a lot more activities, there’s a lot of festivals and dances”.
According to Babel-Co, the MHS festival likely started around 2015. The Lunar New Year celebration began in China as a way to celebrate the new year and bring good luck and fortune, much like New Year’s celebrations in America.
Many members of the Middleton community came to the celebration. One anonymous interviewee said that her mother, who is Chinese, knew about this festival and decided to bring her family.
Another anonymous interviewee said he found this event because of his middle school Mandarin teacher. He learned that in the Lunar New Year festival, “[people] wear red sometimes and gold with red. Sometimes there’s flowers you wear”.
The event was a huge success, with many students and families enjoying the wide variety of activities the festival had to offer. The Chinese Culture Club Leadership expressed their excitement about the festivals’ positive outcome, stating that they look forward to continuing the tradition in the years to come. This festival plays a vital role in bringing cultural awareness into the Middleton community, creating a place where people can be themselves and have fun.
