Also celebrating the festive Chinese New Year season was London. Crowds flocked to one city square to mark the occassion.<br /><br />London bursts into color on Sunday as the capital celebrated Chinese New Year.<br /><br />The center was packed as crowds thronged to Trafalgar Square, Leicester Square and Chinatown. Festivities started with the lighting of long streams of firecrackers.<br /><br />Organizer Suzannah Kwok explained how the event had taken off.<br /><br />[Suzannah Kwok, Celebration Organizer]:<br />"The London Chinatown Chinese Organization have organized the Chinese New Year celebrations in London for over 20 years now, what started off to be a very small community event in Chinatown has now grown to be a major free public event in London, which attracts a lot of Chinese people, Londoners and tourists to London."<br /><br />One of the highlights was the spectacular acrobatic lion dance where two dancers in a lion costume leapt from one high podium to another.<br /><br />The Chinese New Year is the biggest festival in the Chinese calendar. <br /><br />Based on the lunar calendar, the date varies from late January to mid-February.<br /><br />This year, New Years Day fell on February 14 with festivities lasting for up to two weeks.<br /><br />Another tradition is known as the 'eating of the green'.<br /><br />Musicians bang drums and cymbals as a lion dances from shop to shop, leaping up to grab a cabbage hanging in a shop doorway, which it then spits out to represent the sharing of prosperity. <br /><br />The dance is said to bring good fortune and ward off evil spirits for the shop's business.<br /><br />Every year is represented by one of twelve animals from the Chinese zodiac and 2010 is the Year of the Tiger.
