Sending New Year greetings, setting off colorful firecrackers, visiting relatives and friends with carefully chosen presents, strolling through temple fairs with the family, or watching CCTV's annual show on New Year's eve ... all are longstanding ways for Chinese to celebrate the Lunar New Year Festival, which began on Wednesday.

This year's festivities have a novel touch: 2008 is the year that China will host the 29th Olympic Games, which are meant to be a green, high-tech global event. And not surprisingly, the games showed up in many aspects of this year's celebrations.

Watching the CCTV show with the family has become one of the most important rituals for many Chinese. The program often has an audience rating of more than 90 percent.

This year, a very popular part of the program was a little tale about a torchbearer, the story of an elderly couple competing to be Olympic torchbearers. Although they were portrayed as a bit cranky, the two were also as hospitable and warm-hearted as other Olympic volunteers.

After the program, the next thing to do was to set off firecrackers at midnight to say hello to the new year and farewell to the old one. There were different kinds of firecrackers this year, since many cracker-makers featured products with Olympic-related themes.

Beijing Panda Fireworks Ltd., for example, offered a package that held five kinds of crackers symbolizing both the five Olympic rings and five "ring roads" that encircle Beijing.

"The series was produced to wish for a lucky, vigorous and prosperous Beijing Olympics," said Pan Di, the manager of the company.

Pasting Spring Festival scrolls on both sides of the door is one of the major rites Chinese people have observed, and the contents of many scrolls this year were, of course, Olympic-themed.

"Holding the Olympic Games is a 100-year-old dream for all Chinese ... since the dream will finally come true this year, we're pasting the scrolls to show our happiness," said a citizen named Sun Ruisheng. People went out, mostly with the whole family, to visit relatives and friends on Thursday, the first day of the Lunar New Year. But with text messages and e-mail now popular in China, many sent greetings electronically.

Before the Spring Festival, 19 web sites -- including sina.com and sohu.com -- held a competition to choose the best text messages. Twenty of the messages got at least 5 million votes. Olympic-themed messages accounted for 14 of the 20, including number one.

Visitors must also bring presents, and the Olympic mascot, "Fuwa", was popular this year in Beijing.

"We sold about 10,000 yuan worth of 'Fuwa' per day since the middle of January, whereas before that, we got only about 2,000 yuan in daily sales. People bought them mainly as greeting presents," said one approved Beijing outlet for mascot sales in Wangfujing Street, one of the bustling commercial districts in the Chinese capital.

Temple fairs were on the must-do list for many Beijingers. The city's material cultural heritage office said that there would be about 20 temple fairs in Beijing, half with Olympic themes.

Also for the seven-day Spring Festival holiday, Olympic volunteers in the capital set up about 100 kiosks at top restaurants, hotels and tourist sites for visitors from elsewhere in China and overseas. About 10,000 volunteers were ready to provide services like interpretation and map information.

There were also many people who couldn't get home for the holidays, and 1,500 construction workers at the Olympics "water cube" were among them.

"By working with my colleagues on the site, I think I have made my own contribution to the Beijing Olympics, and I feel honored and proud," said a worker named Qu Shusen.

(Xinhua News Agency February 9, 2008)