In the 60s, Chinese New Year was a great time of fun and celebration for kids, who would look forward to it in great anticipation one month before it happened, as it was the only time of the year that most of the poor families could have chicken meat for food, soft drinks, lots of sweets, etc. The normal meals for my family were porridge, olives, fried ikan bilis, and a teochew dish known as 'hu-ju'. These were the cheapest food one could buy, and cost 10 cents for each portion - we could only afford 30 cents and porridge for dinner each day. On days when my mother had more money, we could have rice. So CNY was eagerly awaited.
Besides food and drinks, the other of course was ang-pows. It was the only time when a kid could have more money, or the most money, he could ever had in his life. I had only 5 cents to go to school, and had to take a 20 mins walk to school in order to spend that 5 cents on a drink or a piece of cake. During CNY, with ang-pows from neighbours and relatives, we could get up to $2. The feeling of having so much money to spend on what we normally could not afford was pure bliss!
Besides money, new clothes also made us kids ecstatic, as we usually had hand-me-downs from elder members in the family or kind neighbours or relatives. For my family, my mother had to save all useable cloths and then sew them into a shirt or blouse whenever she could.
Another thing that drove our adrenalin was fire crackers! They would be on sale about 3 weeks before the occasion, and we kids would watching some adults playing with them. Some shops would buy a long train of huge firecrackers, hang it from the top of the houses (about 4 to 5 stories of our HDB flat today), and then the noise of the firecrackers exploding would attract the whole neighbourhood, followed by liion dances.
By the first day of CNY, all the streets would be red in color, being fully filled with the red wrappers of the firecrackers. What a wonderful sight! What wonderful memories!
