Gong Xi Fa Cai !
Chinese New Year is celebrated on the first day of the first month of the Chinese calendar and continues until the fifteenth day when there is a Latern Festival. The Chinese calendar is a lunisolar calendar (based on the cycles of the moon and the sun). For the Chinese, this year is the year of the dog and lunar year 4703-4704. Though China uses the Gregorian calendar (used almost everywhere in the world and is a modification of the Julian calendar for daily events, the Chinese calendar is still used to mark traditional holidays.
The New Year celebrations include children being given Lai-See envelopes (red envelopes containing good luck money), parades, dances, firecrakers (to scare evil away), new clothing, family reunion dinners, cleaning and much more.
The traditional New Years greeting in Mandarin is "Gong Xi Fa Cai" (which is what you'd commonly here in Singapore) or in Cantonese is "Kung Hei Fat Choi". The greeting basically means "congratulations and be prosperous".
Here are a couple photos from a Lion Dance and Dragon Dance put on at CIS.
