Chinese New Year Dinner Party.

This week we're celebrating Chinese New Year, here in Hong Kong. I thought it would be fun to kick off the week by hosting an intimate dinner party for some of my girlfriends. We had a great time picking out decorations from our local market in Sham Shui Po. The shops were full of red and gold and I found some of the shop owners to be friendly and helpful to this naive expat.

For our centerpiece, we used gold branches and some flowering branches that we purchased from the flower market in Mong Kok. We then added a red ribbon with Chinese writing in gold to the vase and hung little red lanterns from the gold branches.

The little red lanterns on the centerpiece mimicked the red lanterns we hung on the two light fixtures in our dining room.

We made our table runner out of sheets of red wrapping paper that had gold Chinese characters written on them. We then layered some red circle cutouts that also had Chinese writing on them and looked as though they had been cut with my Silhouette Cameo I left back in the United States.

Each place setting had a little red money packet tucked into their napkin. I also placed a little gold money chest on top of each napkin as well. The red packets are supposed to be lucky money and the money is given out to children from their parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts.

My favorite detail of the evening was the little goats/sheep that I tied onto chopsticks and placed in each glass as a stir stick. This is the year of the goat/sheep and I loved that little touch as an homage to the new year.