Monday, the 8th of February, 2016 is the 39th day in 2016 and in the 6th calendar week.
General Events:
Chinese New Year
February 8, 2016 in China
February 8, 2016 in China
Chinese New Year is celebrated on February 08, 2016. It is the most important of the traditional Chinese holidays. In China, it is also known as the Spring Festival, the literal translation of the modern Chinese name. Chinese New Year is observed as a public holiday in a number of countries and territories where a sizable Chinese population resides.
Chinese New Year celebrations traditionally ran from Chinese New Year’s Day itself, the first day of the first month of the Chinese calendar, to the Lantern Festival on the 15th day of the first month, making the festival the longest in the Chinese calendar. Because the Chinese calendar is lunisolar, the Chinese New Year is often referred to as the “Lunar New Year”.
Within China, regional customs and traditions concerning the celebration of the Chinese new year vary widely. Often, the evening preceding Chinese New Year’s Day is an occasion for Chinese families to gather for the annual reunion dinner. It is also traditional for every family to thoroughly cleanse the house, in order to sweep away any ill-fortune and to make way for good incoming luck.
Windows and doors will be decorated with red colour paper-cuts and couplets with popular themes of “good fortune” or “happiness”, “wealth”, and “longevity.” Other activities include lighting firecrackers and giving money in red paper envelopes.
Where is Chinese New Year?
Nationwide China
Nationwide China
Vietnamese New Year
February 8, 2016 in Vietnam
February 8, 2016 in Vietnam
Vietnamese New Year is observed on February 08, 2016. Vietnamese New Year, is the most important celebration of Vietnamese culture. It features aspects of the western Thanksgiving, New Year’s Day, Halloween and Birthday. It is the Vietnamese New Year marking the arrival of spring based on the Chinese calendar, a lunisolar calendar. However, like Vietnam, each of these countries have incorporated characteristic rituals and celebrations that are indigenous to their regions, and are harmonious with their cultural history and geographical climate. Vietnamese New Year is celebrated on the same day as Chinese New Year, though exceptions arise due to the one-hour time difference between Hanoi and Beijing resulting in the alternate calculation of the new moon. It takes place from the first day of the first month of the Lunar calendar (around late January or early February) until at least the third day.
Where is Vietnamese New Year?
Nationwide Vietnam
Nationwide Vietnam
Losar
February 8, 2016 in Tibet
February 8, 2016 in Tibet
Losar is the Tibetan New Year, a three-day festival that mixes sacred and secular practices — prayers, ceremonies, hanging prayer flags, sacred and folk dancing, partying. It is the most widely celebrated of all Tibetan festivals and represents a time for all things to be purified and renewed.
Tibetans follow a lunar calendar, so the date of Losar changes from year to year. It begins February 8 in 2016 and January 28 in 2017. It sometimes falls on the same date as Chinese New Year, but not always.
Losar is Tibetan for New Year. The Tibetan calendar is based on Tibetan astrology, a synthesis of Indian and Chinese astrology. The Tibetan calendar is lunar, which means it follows the cycles of the moon, so the New Year begins on a new moon.
The Losar Rituals have many Buddhist elements, but Losar is primarily a secular event with its own flavor. The Tibetan Losar tradition contains elements and values that we share as human beings and, as in our own Western cultures, the New Year here means a fresh beginning. Non-Tibetans are always welcome at these celebrations. The specific rituals are not exclusive; everyone is invited to join the welcoming of a fresh start.
On the first day of Losar, everyone gets up long before dawn, gathers in the temples with the monks and lamas, and participates in making good wishes for the New Year. Everyone is clean and wears their new, (or at least freshly washed), clothes. And also, although this is not a central theme, it is a communal birthday: everyone is one year older. For the rest of the day, most people will stay home, or visit the lamas they feel closely connected to. It is a day of relaxation and fun.
On the second day, Tibetans visit each other and this too is a day of being with family and friends. Tibetans are very fond of the good life, and this is an occasion for good eating, drinking, telling stories, laughing, and playing dice, cards, or mahjong. The kids are in charge of fireworks, and during Losar, one is regularly awakened to the present moment by powerful detonations.
On the third day, the Tibetans in Boudhanath gather at the Great Stupa for a large communal offering. Everyone will wear their new clothes, and the Stupa will be very crowded. First there will be the ceremony of lhasang – incense offering, which is essentially an offering of smoke from medicinal and fragrant herbs, directed at pleasing both the other- worldly beings such as non-humans, i.e.. gods, nagas, and spirits, as well as the sublime beings such as the buddhas and bodhisattvas. At the end, everyone will take roasted barley flour, known as tsampa, and everyone joins in a common chant, and will then hurl the tsampa into space, also as an offering. This practice increases the prosperity, health and happiness of beings, and ‘raises wind horse’, a Tibetan concept that implies uplifting the human spirit and its outer manifestations of good circumstances. This concept also occurs in the Tibetan practice of hanging up prayer flags, which will be done in the days following Losar.
Where is Losar?
Nationwide Tibet
Nationwide Tibet
Rose Monday 2016
February 8, 2016 in Germany
February 8, 2016 in Germany
Rose Monday – also known as Rosenmontag – takes place on February 08, 2016. It is the highlight of the German “Karneval” (carnival) and is on the Shrove Monday before Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. The “Mardi Gras,” though celebrated on Tuesday, is a similar event. Rosenmontag is celebrated in German-speaking countries, including Germany, East Belgium, Austria, and Switzerland, but most heavily in the “Hochburgen” (carnival strongholds), which include the Rhineland, especially in Cologne, Bonn, Düsseldorf, Aachen, and Mainz.
Celebrations usually include dressing up in fancy costumes, dancing, parades, heavy drinking and general public displays with floats. Every town in the Karneval areas boasts, at least, one parade with floats making fun of the themes of the day. Usually, sweets (“Kamelle”) are thrown into the crowds lining the streets among cries of “Helau” or “Alaaf”, whereby the cry “Kölle Alaaf” is only applied in the Cologne area, meaning “Cologne over all”. The celebrations become quieter the next day, known as Veilchendienstag (“Violet Tuesday“, Shrove Tuesday), and end with “Aschermittwoch” (Ash Wednesday).
Carnival is not a national holiday in Germany, but schools are closed on Rosenmontag and the following Tuesday in the strongholds and many other areas. Many schools, as well as companies, tend to give teachers, pupils and employees the Thursday before Rosenmontag off as well and have celebrations in school or in the working place on Weiberfastnacht, although every now and then there are efforts to cut these free holidays in some companies.
Where is Rose Monday?
Nationwide Germany
Nationwide Germany
National Boy Scout Day
February 8, 2016 in the World
February 8, 2016 in the World
Boy Scout Day takes place on February 08, 2016. According to the Scout’s motto, everyone should try to do a good turn on Boy Scout Day. The date goes back to the founding of the Scouts in America by William Dickson Boyce in 1910. In Great Britain Lord Baden-Powel is the so-called father of the Boy Scouts. There are Scout organizations all over the world.
On Boy Scout Day Scouts celebrate themselves. They go to church together on Scout Sunday and have breakfast. Scout Sunday is theSunday next to Boy Scout Day. Scouts learn a lot about nature, spoors, animals and have the claim to always be helpful and friendly. They do sports together and have a wonderful confraternity.
Boy Scouts have had a profound impact on the United States. Many presidents and other dignitaries have been Boy Scouts. A total of 181 Astronauts have also been part of the Boy Scout program.
Where is the event?
Nationwide USA
Nationwide USA
Historical Events on 8th February:
1526 Heavy storm strikes Dutch coast, many die
1690 French & Indian troops set Schenectady settlement NY on fire
1807 Battle of Eylau ends inconclusively between Napoleon’s forces and Russian Empire – 1st battle Napoleon isn’t victorious
1855 The Devil’s Footprints mysteriously appear in southern Devon
1861 Confederate States of America organizes in Montgomery, Alabama (US Civil War)
1879 Sandford Fleming first proposes adoption of Universal Standard Time at a meeting of the Royal Canadian Institute
1887 The Dawes Act authorized the President of the United States to survey Native American tribal land and divide it into individual allotments
1895 Tchaikovsky/Petipa’s “Swan Lake” premieres in St Petersburg
1905 Cyclone hit Tahiti & adjacent islands, killing some 10,000 people
1910 The Boy Scouts of America is incorporated by William D. Boyce
1920 Swiss men vote against women’s suffrage
1920 Bolshevik troops capture Odessa, bringing an end to foreign involvement in the resistance against Bolshevik rule
1926 Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio becomes Walt Disney Studios
1942 Congress advises FDR that, Americans of Japanese descent should be locked up en masse so they wouldn’t oppose the US war effort
1955 The Government of Sindh abolished Jagirdari system in the province. One million acres (4000 km²) of land thus acquired is to be distributed among the landless peasants
1960 Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom issued an Order-in-Council, stating that she and her family would be known as the House of Windsor, and that her descendants will take the name “Mountbatten-Windsor”
1969 Last edition of Saturday Evening Post
1969 Meteorite weighing over 1 ton falls in Chihuahua, Mexico
1983 Champion thoroughbred Shergar kidnapped in Ireland; never found Lloyds of London pays $10.6 million insurance
Which just happens to be my sign from the Chinese calendar! 
M'chelsMusings 