Year 4707 starts on 26 January. Last year, China exploded onto the world stage with the most extravagant Olympic Games in history, becoming the third nation to blast a human being into space, and lining up its booming economy to knock the US off their number 1 spot.

Here in Jersey, Simon Laurens brought a gold medal back from Beijing, one of our up-and-coming tennis players was trained in China, and Jersey Finance decided to open its first overseas office in Hong Kong. As we all wonder where China will take us next, Jerseyman and China expert, Tim Nash, shares something of what seeing in the new year means to the Chinese.

Jersey may have packed away its Christmas lights but the Chinese are just getting started on their big family knees-up. Chinese New Year is when people – like us at Christmas – will travel great distances to eat too much with loved ones. The party starts on the first new moon of the year and goes on for two weeks, with enough fireworks to ensure no-one forgets who invented gunpowder. Celebrations close with the Lantern Festival on the first full moon.

China uses the same calendar as we do but, just as we do with Easter, traditional festivals are still celebrated according to the ancient calendar. Like all ancient calendars, the traditional Chinese calendar is based on the cycles of the moon. The very word for ‘month’ in Chinese is moon – it is in English too, though it’s less obvious!

Ancient peoples the world over noticed that the moon follows a path across the sky called the ‘elliptic’. The elliptic is divided into 12 sections by constellations of stars, which the ancient Greeks imagined to be outlines of the 12 characters of the zodiac. The ancient Chinese saw these constellations as dot-to-dot animals and the 12 animals were used in sequence as symbols for each year. This year is the year of the ox.

The ox may not be too keen on red but it is the colour of happiness, so whilst here in Jersey we’re putting our snowmen jumpers back in the loft, the Chinese are looking out their cheeriest red clothes. (At least they’d be on our side in the Muratti, eh?) Families will paste poetic good wishes around their front doors, written on or cut out of red paper, the way that we put ‘Santa, please stop here’ signs up in our gardens. And rather than finding presents on the big day itself, children will collect their year’s pocket money in redenvelopes from as many relatives as they can manage to wish a ‘Happy New Year’ to.

Chinese New Year is also known as ‘Spring Festival’ so families will have a ‘spring clean’ and blast out the old year with open doors and fire-crackers. You may have gone ‘first footing’ with a lump of coal in your hand, but in China the new year is ushered in with the word for ‘good things’ stuck upside down on doors and in windows. That’s because ‘upside down’ in Chinese sounds the same as ‘come here’.

‘Good things’ in China – as in Jersey – begin with food. The Chinese have their sweets and oranges the same as we do, but their equivalent of our mince pie is savoury. Shuijiao look like mini Cornish pasties but are boiled like ravioli rather than baked. Making these little parcels plump with expectation is a family activity in preparation for a feast on New Year’s Eve.

Families may also enjoy a large fish, the word for which sounds the same as ‘surplus’, and hang up pictures of chubby children where we’ve gone for cherubs. The equivalent of our Christmas tree – which symbolises longevity because it’s an evergreen (despite the sorry specimens now piled up at Bellozanne) – are fresh plants and flowers in the home and uncut noodles on the dinner table. Some people underline the point by not cutting their hair until the second month of the year.

When the first full moon arrives only tide-watchers may notice in Jersey, but all over China people take to the streets and parks to enjoy an evening out. Before street lamps and torches, people would find their way with paper lanterns and so the last night of the New Year celebrations became a ‘Lantern Festival’. The full moon is also mirrored in round balls of rice flour with a myriad of interesting centres, although I’ve yet to come across a strawberry cream. These treats are taken as a symbol of wholeness and a bright future that are the hopes for the year ahead.

In the face of the current economic uncertainties, that is my Chinese New Year wish for Jersey: wholeness and a bright future.

• Tim Nash is China Consultant to the States of Jersey. To pose your questions or share your views and experience of China, register online at www.JerseyChina.com.