Monkeying Around New Year

It's that time of the year again! Out comes all the little red envelopes, on goes all the new year greetings on the walls and doors, rooms to clean, relatives to wish good luck on and all the candied fruit and nuts to eat. It's Chinese New Year again!It's the year of the Monkey this year. How many of our readers and customers are Monkeys, I wonder? It would make new parents receiving our Little Monkey basket all the more appropriate, wouldn't it?So apart from the mass amount of cleaning that needs to be done just before Chinese New Year, what else do you do? Hm, well we try to wear a lot of red because it's the luckiest colour in Chinese culture.If you are in Hong Kong, this is the time of the year where the suburbs, towns and cities erupts with lots and lots of flower markets, with lots of brightly coloured flowers - mostly pink, golds and orange. Cherry blossoms for a promise of new life and romance, bamboo for luck and happiness, peonies for prosperity and heaven forbid you don't lug a potted mandarin plant home. Mandarins and clementines are seen as a sign of good fortune so the Chinese community tends to go nuts around this time of the year in order to get a pot of them into their house.Here in Baskets Galore, we may not have potted plants of mandarins and clementines - I don't think they would fit in the box. But we do have lots of flowering plants to wish the recipients a colourful and fabulous new year. Flowering Delight And lots of fruit baskets as well - just be sure to note that you want mandarin oranges so that we ensure to include them, but then again, they are in season so chances are, we would include them anyway!Or, fish is always a good choice. There is a Chinese New Year greeting for wishing somebody a plentiful year ahead (or to be exact, wish them a year where they have so much, there is a surplus of things) which ends with the sound 'yu', which coincidentally, also shares the same pronunciation as fish. So how about sending a hamper with salmon in it? Great Taste Award Gold