The Year of the Horse - What's That All About?

I did a bit of poking around, to give you a quick summary of what "The Year of the Horse" is all about.    I suspect it will be mentioned a lot in advertising campaigns, especially those targeting us horse lovers, so I wanted to know more about it, in addition to "2014 is the Chinese Year of the Horse".

It turns out the that the calender originally created by the people living in China a long, long, long time ago did not use numbers to mark the years, it used animals - 12 animals - one of them being the horse!   

These animal-named-years came to be used in a similiar way to the way some people use Zodiac symbols.. as a fun way of "predicting" the personality traits of someone born at a particular time.     (The ancient people certainly didn't have ultrasounds to tell them if the baby would be born a boy or a girl, and modern people cannot find out much more than that - yet we all love to speculate about what a baby will look like and be like).

Chinese people today use the same calender as the rest of the world for conducting business, attending school, and other day-to-day things.      BUT, they still use that ancient calender to determine when to celebrate!    New Year's Day, and thus New Year's Eve, is one of the most celebrated holidays by people in China.   Most recently, New Year's Day fell on Friday, January 31st, 2014, and marked the begining of a "horse year".

So, what does the Chinese Zodiac tradition say about those born in a year of the horse?   
energetic, intelligent, cheerful and entertaining, like being center of attention and crave success.  They also have a hard time restraining themselves resulting in over-spending and temper tantrums when things don't go as they'd like. 

The Chinese Zodiac tradition also offers predictions as to what the year will bring (another thing we'd all love to be able to have a peak at!).    For most people, years of the horse are said to be good years of prosperity.   Unfortunately, for those born in previous years of the horse, the outlook is not quite as good, but not at all disasterous.     

Still, those born in between 1/27/90-2/14/91, and 2/12/02-1/31/03 get to say EVERY YEAR that they were born in the year of the horse - and that is pretty cool!    And, yes, it includes MY horse lover, maybe that's where she gets it!

Happy Year of the Horse!

For more info on the Ancient Chinese Calender, check out this website   Chinese Calender Information


Related topics to research:  

 - How were horses used in ancient China, 
 - Where else did horses live in ancient times