Make: Double Happiness Symbol for Chinese New Year

The Chinese New Year celebrations started yesterday, but I’m hoping it’s not too late to share a fun project with you. (The party lasts for two weeks, so we’re good, right?)

Paper-cutting is very popular in China, so Lily and I thought it would be fun to introduce the art form to her class during our annual Chinese New Year party. We cut out shuang xi, which means “double happiness.” The character xi means “joy,” so when you fold and cut the paper just the right way, you get two of them. Hence the double happiness!

To make your own Double Happiness symbols, you just need red construction paper in the 9″ X 12″ family, a pencil, scissors, and the Shuang Xi Template. Take your rectangular piece of paper and lay it “hot dog” style in front of you. Fold the lower half up over the top half and then repeat. Size your template to fit your paper (or vice versa!) and cut out your double happiness character.

On a side note, Lily’s magical teacher, Mrs. Elbe, is really good at getting kids to make connections, whether it’s person-to-person, person-to-text, person-to-self, etc. A fun connection that happened during the party was that a lot of the kids in the class are German and we talked about how paper-cutting, or scherenschnitte, is a very popular art form in Germany, too.

Shortly after I posted the original photo, a reader kindly pointed out that our symbol was upside-down. I apologize for the mistake! Here’s the correct version—it took a few years, but better late than never, I hope? (Huge thank you to Lily for being such a good sport.)