30th of 12 Moon (Chinese Calender), 17/2/07, Sat, wake up early... no jet lag.. good, the eve normally started with some ritual in morning, start with the praying to the Sky God, the simple altar is setup in front of the house, large Joss-sticks was used (not so large, some ppl used even larget and longer)
Burning a pair of red candles and some fix number of joss-stick (normally 3, 9 or 12)

Next is the Sky God altar (I not sure the real name, just direct translation) , some offering for the God.

The offering are steam chicken, some spring onion, roast pork, some "kuih", tea and rice wine.














After this, next is in the kitchen, ritual for the Kitchen God, Zao Jun, (灶君).

Later, the ritual continue to the main deity of my home, the main god whom take care of the safety of this house. There are many different deity, the one we have in our home is Guan Yu (關聖帝君) (the middle one with 3 person), and after that to my ancestor altar (the totally red colour one in the picture)

After all these ceremony, the chicken and roast pork shown above will be chop into right size pieces and as a dish for CNY gathering dinner, one of the most important dinner for the Chinese family during the whole years. All the family member "should" be back to attend this special dinner. We have it as lunch because everybody were already back home, and we are hungry :-)
So after this, I just eat and relax, watch TV and sweat, sooooo hot in my home :-)... and wait for midnight for next ritual ...in next post..
So below some closeup to the chicken used for the ritual ... :-)