I will know a lot more about it 5-6 days from now than I do at this moment, but I’m beginning to realize that the Lunar (Chinese) New Year is a big deal. A very big deal.

It’s Friday, and the holiday doesn’t officially begin until Monday, but I already can feel the eagerness and anticipation and excitement building.

More people are on the streets. And they are shopping. Again. Still.

In a way, it’s like this has been a holiday period for a full month, from Christmas (which only a minority of Hongkongers celebrate as a religious holiday, but which everybody embraces as an excuse to shop) right through the Western New Year and now up to the Chinese New Year.

It’s not as if people are slacking, exactly, because I’m not sure your average Chinese ever does slack off … but I see more people on the subway, on the streets, in restaurants. More school kids seem out and about.

The subway has been more crowded than ever, too.

If you check around the Web, you can find stories about how the trains in mainland China are just massively crowded this time of year, because this is the one time when all the migrant workers go back to their homes in the interior of the country and take gifts.

It’s an interesting holiday in that many Chinese work six- or seven-day weeks (certainly all the small-business owners do), but this thing is a three-day legal holiday.

We don’t have anything like that in the U.S.  We try to invent them, stringing together a Friday holiday with a weekend. But it’s patchwork. It’s not official.

I know all sorts of things will be shut down. I’m wondering if the mail will be delivered, those three days. (I think not.) I know that the woman who cleans up the newsroom here at the IHT will NOT be in here Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday nights.

One of the veterans here claims Hong Kong isn’t really a big place for celebrating Chinese New Year. That it empties out, to a certain extent, with all the migrants going back to the mainland. That things here are muted.

But if the energy and anticipation I sense are “not such a big deal” … I can only wonder how intense it must be in the big cities of the mainland.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to it. Mostly. I’m wondering if I will be able to get basic things done (grocery-shopping, subway-riding) … but I also am keen to experience it. As well as it can be experienced considering I will be at work Monday and Tuesday nights, the two biggest nights for celebrating. And Sunday, too, which (I think) is Chinese New Year’s Eve.

A cultural learning experience, anyway. I’m sure I will have more about it in the next few days.