Harnessing the New Year’s luck

While Chinese New Year is still on January 31, 2014; early Kong Hei Fat Choi greetings to everyone on today's January 1 New Year's Day in the western calendar!

This early, traditional western tips on practices on how to beckon luck to one's person and environs be it home and office abound from oral and hand-me-down traditions from parents, grandparents and peers.

Noche Buena from European colonizers is the common purveyor of hope for any family, rich or poor alike.  Food on the table symbolizes hope for a bountiful and abundant year of being able to provide for the nutrition and health needs for survival of the family in the coming year.  Thus the belief in round food objects to serve on the table, like twelve (for 12 months) round (symbol for money and harmony) fruits plus a pineapple (borrowing from Chinese tradition of "ong lai" or the term for pineapple that sounds like welcoming prosperity).  Lucky foods are served in the belief in what they symbolize to bring: for family harmony its whole chicken, for thanksgiving, turkey; marital fidelity, peking duck; grapes for abundance; tangerines or oranges for wealth or money.

Some even invent inanities depending on where the advice is coming from! Charlatans even augur bananas as family unity! (In feng shui, it is for fertility in the bad sense of favouring the male breadwinner to have other illegitimate kids taken from the concubine culture of old dynasties as each mistress competes to give the King their trophy successor son!)

From throwing rice, coins, candies even on one's bed and rolling on them like a greedy fool, many are wont to be as gullible in the name of greed!

Borrowed mythical rituals from Asian folklores like bathing in salt water to cleanse one of evil and be protected for the new year, to the likes of pomelo tainted bathwaters too! Others  tip toe over a pile of smoking incense or sprinkling sea salt or smoking with incense every nook and cranny of a home or office. Or buying a charm!

Jumping to the toll of church bells on New Year's eve is a common sight based on belief that if you do so, you will grow taller in the coming year.  In feng shui, these  mere fun shows!

Real feng shui is in the heart and mind with focus on harnessing luck for oneself and loved ones as desired in a determined and disciplined manner, not gullible or keeping with Joneses type!

It is simply by subjecting one's home and business offices to a formal feng shui engagement or consultation guided by a real or authentic expert! Either for feng shui annual maintenance or for starting on the right foot so to speak in harnessing not only luck but good health and prosperity every step of the way in the forthcoming year.  Remember, if you plan to fail, you fail to plan even in getting lucky! Happy and Lucky New Year's Day!

For questions interactive to the foregoing topic or any topic on feng shui you want to be taken up, you may email masteraldric@ gmail.com so that these can be answered accordingly in succeeding column articles. you may add FengShui Aldric on Facebook, as well as visit www.punsoy.com.