During the previous week, we've seen special vendors selling red and gold door ornaments for the holiday. Traditionally, on either side of a door, people would paste red strips of paper painted with couplets announcing the arrival of spring, good fortune, or both. There are still a few of these, but much more common are cut-outs of a Hallmark-cute girl and boy dressed in Qing Dynasty garb, or a diamond-shaped picture featuring the character for fortune or happiness.

The market has been doing a brisk business lately and prices have risen. The number of fruit vendors doubled since it is customary to bring fruit, especially tangerines symbolizing gold coins, to the people one visits during the holiday. We also saw plenty of chickens being carried upside-down to their deaths. Because we are so far from the ocean, seafood is not especially common in Kunming. But on the New Year, families must eat fish because the word for fish, "yu," sounds just like the word for abundance. The live fish in our market come from the big lake on the city's west side.

Over the course of the last week, our housing complex has emptied. For Spring Festival, it is expected that children, no matter how old, will return to their ancestral homes. Our college has shallow roots in Kunming. During the Cultural Revolution, the Beijing Forestry College was sent to Anning, a small town in Yunnan Province, so the urban faculty could share forestry practices with the rural peasants. There was a certain logic to this since Yunnan has plentiful forests while Beijing boasts a great deal of pavement. At the end of the Cultural Revolution, some of the faculty returned to Beijing, but a lot who preferred the climate here stayed on and founded the Southwest Forestry College. Ten years ago, the college moved to Kunming because a rural location was not convenient for the kind of international projects the college was beginning to attract. A few of the staff have family in Kunming, but the vast majority do not. None of our friends have remained here for the holiday.

Yesterday, the equivalent of New Year's Eve, John and I biked over to the city's primary Buddhist temple. The English-language TV news has been talking about the revival of traditional temple fairs in Beijing for the holiday and we wanted to see if there was any action in Kunming. Admittedly, there were more devotees there then on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, but none of the acrobatic performances, singing, and dancing that are allegedly going on in Beijing's temples. The monks weren't even chanting; they ambled around in the sunshine, or leaned in doorways cracking sunflower seeds with their teeth. People were burning incense: either bundles of slender wands, or else single sticks, each the size of a baseball bat. It's been very windy lately, and a few incense offerings were dramatically transformed into flaming torches by the stiff breeze. Some people were lighting red votive candles, but these really didn't work well in the wind, and I can't help wondering what becomes of wishes that are so quickly extinguished.

Then we biked around downtown to see if anything was going on, but with each passing hour, the city grew quieter and quieter. By the time we headed home at 4:00, almost every single shop was closed. Our own neighborhood would have seemed like a ghost town were it not for the steady popping of firecrackers.

With nightfall, the sounds of firecracker explosions multiplied. John and I strolled outside to check out the activity. Very few people were out, and everyone who was outdoors was busy igniting firecrackers. You would never know that the government has banned them; even PLA (People's Liberation Army) soldiers were gleefully setting off fireworks. Many of the firecrackers simply produced machine gun-like noise, but there were also what we used to call Roman Candles, and plenty of sparklers. To me, it seemed a little dangerous. Between the strong wind suddenly gusting sparks and the poor judgment of five-year olds shooting Roman Candles like rifles, I couldn't help wondering if the People's Second Red Cross Hospital emergency room had stayed open for burn victims. Every now and then we would see a burst of pink or green high in the night sky. Looking up, we were even more startled by how many constellations were visible. The noise and flashes of light continued through the night, with a deafening crescendo at midnight.

If you ever wanted to see Kunming's male population wear white shirts and ties, this morning was a rare opportunity to do so. People were dressed in their best, heading off with bags of fruit to visit friends and relatives. Even so, there was much less bustle than on an ordinary day, and the vast majority of Bailongsi's shops were closed.

The small lane of fruit vendors that leads to the market was devoid of any commerce except for two small tables of firecrackers for sale. People were sitting around playing cards, majiang, and of course, setting off firecrackers. Fruit wrappers and spent firecrackers littered the ground.

Bailongsi's market normally has 80 -100 vendors--John says even more, and I'm willing to admit he could be right. This morning, there was exactly one meat vendor present. The area, which is normally a beehive of activity, seemed vast and empty. Small children were shooting Roman candles in the open space. Fortunately, I had considered the possibility of a limited market on Spring Festival and had stocked up on produce--but it had never occurred to me there would be NO market. And speaking of markets, China's stock market is closed for two whole weeks for holiday. Yet when we biked past N-Mart this afternoon, we saw that holiday or not, the store was open and apparently pretty crowded.

Early last month, when it was unclear if there would be any Christmas celebrations at all, I was perfectly willing to forego my culture's big day and instead observe China's main holiday just one month later. But as it happens, "observe" is an accurate word to describe our participation in Spring Festival. We see the chickens being carrying home on bicycle handlebars, we see the decorations going up (and I even hung one on our own door), we see the people promenading from one visit to another. But to us, it is another day, one strangely marked by a lack of anything to do in the public sphere.