The first month on Tibetan Calendar is the one filled with festivals. Celebrations take place almost every day. Among them, the New Year's Festival (which is dubbed as Losar) is the most important one.

The traditional festival, the Tibetan New Year, or Losar for 2012 will approach in late Feburary, about a month later than the Chinese New Year, or the Spring Festival. Hence, we introduce Tibetan custom for celebrating the festival in different places.

Lhasa people always prepare for it as early as in the previous month. From the middle of the l2th Tibetan month, every family begins to fry a kind of doughnut made of butter and flour called 'karsai' in various shapes. They will also prepare offerings for the deities, e.g. tsampa, barley grains, horse-beans, wild ginseng, barley ears, cockscomb flowers and the Sun & Moon tablets, all being placed in a multi-colored wooden container called Qemar.

Tibetans buy New Year scrolls which symbolize happiness, prosperity and sweet love at a market in Lhasa, capital of Tibet, Feb 23, 2011. [Photo/Asianewsphoto]

On the 28th or 29th day, every household will clean the family shrine and furniture, and even whitewash their courtyard walls. They will also decorate auspicious markings with tsampa flour on the central wall of the cleaned kitchen, or on the floor in front of the gate.

On the evening of the 29th, all family members will sit around the table, and eat a kind of dumpling called as Gortu, in which some small pebbles, wool, charcoal, or hot chili, with different implications, may be jokingly stuffed. During eating, the things emerged will always trigger spells of laughing.

Afterwards all people will go out to take part in a ceremony called expelling ghosts. A magnificent scene soon appears in the whole city: a few persons carrying big bowls of ghost-food are rushing in front, while a large number of people holding torches and running behind them are yelling to get rid of evil spirits from their houses, until they arrive at a big campfire, where they then smash the bowls and throw them into the fire.

Before dawn of the next day, i.e. the Tibetan New Year's Day, the housewives will go to the riverside to fetch "lucky water" to cook the breakfast. After having breakfast, the family members, all dressed up, are solemnly waiting for the dawn, when they will begin to worship the deities and greet and toast each other. 

On the second day, relatives and friends will visit each other with the New Year's greeting.

On the third, people will flock to Bumpari Hill in the eastern suburbs and Chakpori hill in the western suburbs to bum cypress branches, erect the prayer flag mast and hang the multi-colored flags praying for the mountain and river god's blessing.

The butter sculpture dates back to Tang Dynasty when Wencheng Princess brought a sculpture of Sakyamuni, which was a wedding gift sent by Songtsen Gampo, then Tibetan King and was consecrated in Jokhang Temple. [Photo/yuanyephoto.com]

During the festival, Lhasa is overflowing with songs and dances, shaken by exploding sounds of firecrackers and cloaked with the joyful atmosphere.

The festival atmosphere in other regions is similar to that of Lhasa. However, there are some variations in scheduling. For example, in the Tsang region centered by Xigaze, the people will worship the God of Land and the guarding deities on the second New Years' Day. They will burn cypress branches and pole the prayer flags on the flat roofs of their own houses to worship the deities on the third day. In Amdo region, people will climb to mountaintop to burn the cypress branches for deities on the New Year's Day and then visit the aged of the village with New Year's greetings.

In other places, like the Gongbo area, the New Year begins on the first day of the tenth Tibetan lunar month. On New Year's Eve, before having their dinner, people would let a dog, as a foreteller' eat first. What it eats is the focus of the family, because it hints at the fortune of the family for the coming year. If the dog eats ghee or grated cheese, this foreshows a blossom pasture, if it eats tsampa or cake, it predicts a good crop harvest; but if it eats meat, it is a very unlucky sign, meaning that death or pestilence may occur in the family. Curiously, the dog seems to understand the wish of its host, and eats little meat.

Afterwards, the family eventually begins their New Year's reunion dinner. They try to eat as much as possible, because otherwise they believe they will be carried away by ghosts. In the early morning of the New Year's Day they eat only barley flake gruel, which has long been a laughing matter for the people of other areas.

The legendary explanation for the utterly different New Year's month of Gongbo region is as follows f In order to encourage the Gongbo men to focus themselves to resist an invading enemy, the Gongbo king decided to celebrate the New Year Festival quite ahead of time, i.e. the first day of the tenth Tibetan month. This practice has been passed down to today.

Besides this, there are also some other regions, where the date of the New Year is different from elsewhere. For instance, the Tibetan people living in the pastoral area of the Northwestern Sichuan celebrate the festival according to the Han lunar New Year's days.

The Tibetan people living in Jiarong, the rural area of Aba prefecture, the Northwestern Sichuan do it on the 13th day of the l0th or 11th Han lunar month, called the Tsampa New Year's.

The Tibetan people living in Baima, the steep mountain valley areas ranging from northern Sichuan to southern Gansu, do it on the l5th day of the first Han lunar month, named the Torch Festival, while the Tibetan people living in Mianning area in Southeastern Sichuan do it in the middle of the 6th Han lunar month, also called the Torch Festival.