Memories of New Year’s of your childhood years, that helped shaped and formed your values as you’d become, adults, translated…
The Chinese New Years arrived, again, the parents are now, stressed out, over the red envelopes, again. I’d once heard my parents who are already gone now told, from before, my paternal grandfather would keep a bundle of red envelopes under the supper table inside a cardboard box, and he’d not counted how many he had packed, my uncles who are too naughty would, use their feet to get them to their seats from beneath the tables as they were having their New Year’s Eve meals.
This was from seventy, eighty years ago, I couldn’t understand WHY my grandfather kept the red envelopes inside a box, under the supper tables? Maybe, in hopes of, there are many, offspring? Who knows!
and this is what children of Asian cultures are receiving around the Chinese New Years…
And as it came to our generation, we’re still, a large extended, family, with lots of brothers, but since I was able to understand things, my father’s red envelopes to us, he’d, allowed us to spend it however way we wanted to. In the elementary and middle school years, I’d used the money from the red envelopes to go see the movies, as I entered into college, I’d saved the money from my father as well as my older brothers, and used them as money for living for the following semester at school.
And, as I started working, there are still, the three, to five children per family trends, back then, there were, over twenty of my nieces and nephews who were in their elementary years and younger, and, as the holidays rolled on in, as their uncle, I’d, needed to, give them the red envelopes, and I was then burdened, by my own, economics. As I got married, the government advocated “two children is just the right number!”, and so, before my two young daughters understood, WHAT red envelopes were, the ones they’d received, could only, cover, some of my, losses from earlier years.
Until my children entered into the elementary years, they’d come to understand what money was used for, and I’d, taken after my own father’s methods, allow them to do what they wanted to with the money for New Years, I’d, NOT allowed them to use the excuse of saving the amount for their tuitions at school, or to make up for their dad’s red envelopes to their cousins, instead, had them returned the red envelopes back to my own father.
These red envelopes, were a sort of a “year-end bonus” for children, it can let them buy things that they’d wanted to have, or go into their dream fund, and all of us parents, we should all, stop finding the reasons, to get them to, turn over the money to us.
And so, this, is how the value of money is, learned, and internalized, and, this father, he’d learned from his own childhood experiences of being given the red envelopes, to allowing his own two daughters to, make use of their extra “end-of-year bonus” that they were receiving at New Years.
Life, the Obstacle Course 