Hot Springs celebrates Chinese New Year

Hot Springs - The community of Hot Springs came together Saturday afternoon to celebrate the Chinese New Year. Although the Chinese New Year was actually Thursday the 19th, the town decided to move their celebrations to Saturday.

Starting at 1:00pm, members of the community of Hot Springs met in front of The Wall Street building. Everyone was preparing for the annual Chinese New Year parade. The community’s New Year dragon was laid out in preparation for the parade down Main Street. Anyone that wanted to participate in the parade was allowed to show up, dressed however they wanted, and join the parade.

The town has been holding a Chinese New Year parade and other celebrations for years, but the dragon that the town uses is fairly new. Kurt Crews and other members of the community decided they needed a new dragon. “We decided to make a dragon, and then decided to learn how to make paper mache,” explained Crews, as he was helping set up a drum circle. He said that one day after it was built, the community came out and about 30 people painted the dragon. “We didn’t know what we were doing, just sort of did it.”

Kelly Pedersen, who moved to Hot Springs in 2012 described helping make the dragon in 2011 prior to moving, “This big piece of fabric was out in the community and everybody was painting it and making hats and that was kind of my introduction to Hot Springs.”

When the parade began, volunteers hoisted the dragon up on polls and began to march down Main Street, moving the polls up and down. Residents from the town and visitors who were eating and drinking in the bars stepped out to watch the dragon and the other participants in the parade dance by. The drum circle played in the background.

This year is the year of the sheep, following the Chinese Zodiac Calendar, so as part of the parade volunteers Laura Lanfear and Kathryn McEnery walked in a large sheep costume down the street. The artist who made the sheep costume was Linny Gibson.

The parade lasted for a short time and wrapped around and back up the street to its starting point. The drummers played the drums for some time more and people danced in the street and conversed for a while. Dawn Ferdig and her daughters, Loti and Samantha, who were dressed as clowns, blew bubbles. “This was my first time dressing up like a clown, it was fun,” said Ferdig.

Eventually, everyone cleared out and waited for the festivities to pick up around 7:00pm outside of the Symes Hotel. Leslie Smith ,the owner of the Symes, invited the fire spinning group, Spunout Hippies, to give a show on the lawn of the Hotel. The fire spinners drew a large crowd that stood watching next to a large bonfire to stay warm with the freezing temperatures.

Troy and Stella Holloway, who were taking a small vacation to stay in Hot Springs to see family, remarked how they thoroughly enjoyed watching the fire spinners. Stella said she had never seen fire spinners before. “I’m very impressed,” both of them said at the same time. Troy watched the parade earlier in the day and remarked, “They got into it, it was great,” describing community’s enjoyment of putting on the parade.

The restaurant at the Symes offered Chinese special dishes, pork noodle soup, stir fried chicken or orange chicken for the main courses, and pot stickers and egg rolls for appetizers. The pork noodle soup was very popular and discussed quite a bit.

To finish the night, after the fire spinners completed their show, fireworks were set off.