Chinese New Year, CNY, Singapore - why oranges and what you can do with them

Chinese New Year decorations from 2023, at a condo in Singapore. Photo by Angela Lansbury. Copyright.

Small potted trees with real oranges. The garden centre told us they were limes. They start green and turn yellow. They make good marmalade, but it takes a lot of time and effort. Photo by Angela Lansbury. Copyright.

Flower decorations for festivals

In Singapore fruit, flowers, food, lanterns, money - all are familiar features of festivals. For Chinese New Year, expect

1 Trees full of tiny mandarin oranges, symbols of good luck. Spring.

2 Huge boxes of full size mandarin oranges in supermarkets and gift shops.

3 Shopkeepers and friends will give you two oranges. You give two oranges to friends who have given you two oranges. Customers and club members, are given gifts. Banks used to give red packets, the size for containing gifts of new banknotes in multiples of the lucky number 8. 

4 Red lanterns

5 Goodwill messages in whatsapp, often animated. All colourful borders, messages of goodwill in Chinese. Photos and videos can be customised to incude your photo, photo of your business, your family.  Add animations and music if you are creative or advertising a product, service or business.

Orange Trees

You can buy a small potted tree to put outside your home, hotel, or business. Some garden centres hire out one, a pair for either side of an entrance door, a huge one, or  dozens around a building. You don't have to buy them. You can hire them for the festivity. Then the company collects them in a van.

Eventually the small oranges fall off. Mostly they are swept up and thrown away. Some will be perfect. Some will have gone rotten, because that was why they fell, or becuase they bruised when hitting the round.

We had three trees. The first time we had a good one which somebody threw out at the end of the season, when the oranges were starting to shrivel and the leaves were dying, obviously the recipient had not bothered to water it. 

I revived it. I placed it on our lounge balcony in the condo in Singapore. Our first neighbour was an elderly retired man who watered it regularly for us and kept it alive.

Later we lost it and bought a replacement. Then we went away longer and the new neighbours were busy with their children and did not keep plants so were not keen on watering.

I compensated by picking up fallen oranges from a public display, one or two, somethimes three, alwmost every day for a week or two, in Singapore. We made them into marmalade two years running. 

Our Singaporean friends were surprised that such tiny oranges could be eaten. They took the trouble to make home made bisuciuts, often with nuts or seeds or pineapple as ingredients. But they did not use oranges.