What is Laba Festival and why is it celebrated?

Growing up in Guangzhou, our family always knew Laba Festival (腊八节, Làbā Jié) as the day when the aroma of sweet porridge filled the house. We’re excited to share our experience of this special festival with our community here in Barry. In China, Laba Festival marks the unofficial start of the Chinese New Year season – a time when families like ours begin preparing our homes, our hearts, and of course our kitchens for the celebrations to come. While Laba is not as famous internationally as Chinese New Year itself, it holds a treasured place in our family traditions. We remember waking up on Laba morning to the sound of a gently bubbling pot and our mother cheerfully announcing that the Laba porridge was ready. It’s a humble dish, but to us it meant a day of gratitude, warmth, and togetherness in the middle of winter.

Even though we now run a Chinese takeaway in Barry far from Guangzhou, we carry these traditions with us. Talking about Laba Festival in our shop often sparks curiosity – many of our local friends have never heard of it. That’s exactly why we love to share what we know. In this post, we’ll explain what Laba Festival is, when it takes place, and how it’s celebrated, especially through food. Consider this our way of welcoming you into our cultural kitchen, just like we welcome you into our takeaway. By the end, you’ll know why after Laba, every little sign of spring festival makes us smile, and why a simple bowl of porridge can hold a whole world of meaning for us.

What is the Laba Festival?

The Laba Festival is a traditional Chinese holiday celebrated on the 8th day of the 12th lunar month (the lunar month is called Làyuè, the “waxing month” of winter). Its name literally comes from “La” (the twelfth month) and “ba” (eight). This timing usually puts Laba in mid-January on the Western calendar, though occasionally it can fall in late December. For example, in recent years it has been observed as early as December 30th or as late as January 20th, depending on the lunar cycle. No matter the exact date, when the eighth day of that final lunar month arrives, Chinese families know the New Year is only about three weeks away. There’s even a folk saying we grew up with: “After Laba, Spring Festival draws near”– basically, once you’ve had your Laba porridge, it’s time to get ready for the Chinese New Year festivities.

Historically, Laba Festival was about closing out the old year with thanks and prayers. In ancient China, people held ceremonies to honor their ancestors and pray for a good harvest and good luck in the coming year. It was essentially an end-of-year thanksgiving. The tradition dates back over two millennia and became popular as early as the Song Dynasty (960–1279 AD). Our elders used to tell us that “La” (臘) was the month of sacrifices – a time when farmers offered the first tastes of the harvest to their ancestors in gratitude. Over time, as Buddhism spread in China, Laba also came to commemorate a key Buddhist event: the enlightenment of Gautama Buddha (Sakyamuni). According to legend, the Buddha attained enlightenment on the eighth day of the twelfth month, after being nourished by a heartfelt bowl of porridge given by a shepherdess. Because of this, Laba is sometimes called the “Buddha’s Enlightenment Day” in Chinese Buddhism, and many of the customs have a Buddhist influence.

Importantly, Laba Festival is not a public holiday in China – businesses and schools don’t close for it. It’s more of a cultural and family observance. That said, it’s very much alive in Chinese homes and temples. In fact, Buddhist temples often celebrate Laba by cooking big pots of Laba porridge to share with the community for free. Growing up, we saw long queues of people at our local temple waiting for a warm bowl of this porridge handed out by monks as a blessing. Laba Festival, in essence, is about sharing, reflection, and starting the new year with a warm heart and full belly.

When Is Laba Festival (And Why Does the Date Change)?

Because Laba follows the lunar calendar, its date shifts slightly each year on the Gregorian (Western) calendar. It always falls on lunar month 12, day 8, but that could correspond to different dates in December or January for us. Typically, Laba Festival ends up in early to mid-January most years. For instance, the Laba Festival was observed on 7 January 2025, but in 2023 it happened to land on 30 December 2023. It all depends on when Chinese New Year (Spring Festival) is set to occur – since Laba is roughly three weeks before Lunar New Year Eve.

To give you an idea, here are a few recent Laba dates:

• 2023: December 30, 2023 (for the Year of the Dragon’s spring festival in 2024)

• 2024: January 18, 2024

• 2025: January 7, 2025

• 2026: January 26, 2026

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As you can see, it usually comes around the first or second week of January, but it can creep into late December or later in January. We always circle the date on our calendar (lunar and regular) so we don’t miss it. This year or any given year, if you’re curious, you can look up the Lunar calendar’s twelfth month to find when Laba falls. It’s a bit like how Easter shifts around – but once you know it’s the lunar “December” 8th, it makes sense in the Chinese seasonal context.

For us in the UK, these dates might not have much immediate meaning, but we feel them approaching. When the calendar turns to a new year and January comes, we know Laba is near.

Even though here in Barry it’s not marked on any official calendar, our family makes a point to remember it. It’s usually a chilly time – perfect for a hot bowl of congee! By observing Laba Festival even while living abroad, we maintain a living connection to our homeland’s seasonal rhythm. It’s one more way we keep our culture alive in our household, and share it with our children who are growing up British-Chinese. And if you ever notice our social media or in-shop chatter in early January, you might hear us mention why we’ve been simmering a special pot in the kitchen that day.

How Do People Celebrate Laba Festival?

Like many Chinese festivals, Laba is celebrated through food and meaningful rituals rather than big public events or parties. The most iconic tradition is enjoying a bowl of Laba congee, also known as Laba porridge or “eight treasures porridge.” In Chinese, we call it 腊八粥 (làbā zhōu), and it’s a rich, sweet rice porridge made by slow-cooking at least eight different ingredients together. Why eight? In Chinese culture eight is a lucky number and, in this case, it symbolizes a bountiful harvest – each ingredient represents abundance and good fortune for the year ahead. This is why some people even refer to Laba as the “Rice Porridge Festival”.

Laba porridge is not your everyday breakfast porridge; it’s special. The base is usually glutinous rice simmered to a silky texture. To this, families add a variety of grains, beans, nuts, and dried fruits – the “treasures.” Common ingredients include red beans, peanuts, millet, corn, oats, wheat, and rice for the grains, plus lotus seeds, dried longan fruit, jujubes (red dates), goji berries, chestnuts, almonds, and walnuts for sweetness and nutrition. Honestly, whatever the family has on hand can go in, as long as there’s a good mix. My grandmother used to say you should have at least eight ingredients, but there’s no upper limit – some traditional recipes, like the famous Beijing-style Laba porridge, can include 15 or 20 different items for extra richness. In northern China, some even add bits of tofu and meat for a heartier version, whereas in the south (where Guangzhou is) we tend to keep it purely grain and fruit-based and on the sweeter side.

Preparation for Laba porridge often starts the night before Laba. In our home, we’d see bags of beans and rice soaking overnight on January 7th, and first thing on Laba morning (January 8th) the cooking would begin before dawn. The porridge simmers for several hours until all the ingredients are soft and the flavours blend into a fragrant, slightly sweet concoction. I remember the whole house would smell nutty and sweet. Traditionally, the first bowl is offered to the ancestors or the family altar as a sign of respect and gratitude. The rest is ladled out to the family for breakfast – and what a nourishing breakfast it is! Packed with proteins, fibre, and vitamins from all those ingredients, Laba congee is considered very healthy, a perfect thing to warm you up in the winter. In fact, one folk belief says that if you have leftovers, it’s a good omen – it means prosperity and plenty for the coming year. Some families deliberately make a huge pot to ensure there’s some left, and even dab a bit of leftover porridge onto fruit trees outside, as a prayer for a good harvest in the fall. We kids loved this idea – and yes, we usually had leftovers which we happily ate the next day.

Beyond porridge, Laba Festival has other customs that might surprise you. A popular one in northern China is making Laba garlic (腊八蒜, làbā suàn). If you walk into a Beijing or Shandong household on Laba, you might see jars of peeled garlic cloves soaking in vinegar on the windowsill. People start pickling garlic on Laba Day and let it sit until Lunar New Year. During those weeks, the garlic slowly turns an emerald-green color and develops a mild, sour bite. The green Laba garlic is then eaten alongside dumplingsduring the New Year’s reunion dinner – it’s a zesty condiment! Our family didn’t practice this in Guangzhou (Laba garlic is far more common in the north than in the south), but we knew about it. Interestingly, there’s a cute wordplay behind it: in Mandarin, the word “garlic” (suàn) sounds like “calculate” (suàn). Folks say that Laba is when businesses “calculate their accounts” for the year – balancing ledgers, paying off debts. In old times, creditors would collect debts around Laba. So pickling “suàn” became a symbolic reminder to settle your year-end finances (a bit like “balancing the books with vinegar”!). Whether or not people still connect it to bookkeeping today, the tradition of tangy Laba garlic lives on. And by the way, the vinegar from the garlic jar is also prized – it becomes a bright green garlic-infused vinegar that’s delicious with dumplings. Nothing goes to waste in these traditions.

Laba is also a day when families start their New Year preparations in earnest. Think of it as the starter pistol for the Spring Festival marathon. In many regions, right after Laba, families begin deep-cleaning the house, a practice we call “sweeping the dust” to get rid of any bad luck or old grime before the New Year. I can recall my parents saying the cleaning we did on Laba was to ensure a clean slate (literally and figuratively) for the New Year. People also begin preparing preserved foods for the Lunar New Year from this day. For example, curing meats or drying tofu are common activities following Laba. In some provinces, there’s a tradition of making Laba tofu, which involves cutting tofu into pieces and letting it air-dry or ferment a bit, so it can be stored and enjoyed during Spring Festival. We didn’t do tofu at home, but our neighbors did and often shared some with us – it had a unique, rich taste after being dried.

Another thing that happens after enjoying Laba porridge is that children (and adults) get a little more antsy – the excitement for Chinese New Year starts to build. When I was little, I knew that after Laba, we’d soon be shopping for new year decorations, planning our journey to visit relatives, or making New Year’s cake (niángāo) and dumplings to freeze for the holiday. Laba Festival essentially kicks off a month of festive prep, and you can feel the atmosphere change. It’s similar to how, say, in the UK the holiday feeling ramps up after December 1st when Advent calendars start – except in China, Laba is that trigger that “New Year is coming!”. There’s even a nursery rhyme many of us learned: “Little children, don’t be greedy; after Laba, it’s New Year’s time” – a playful way to remind kids not to overindulge in porridge because plenty of feasting is around the corner.

Laba Festival in Our Family (And Sharing It With You)

For our family, the Laba Festival carries a lot of personal meaning. Being a Cantonese family, our celebration focused on the food and family togetherness rather than religious rites. Every year on Laba morning, my mum would wake up extra early to start cooking the Laba porridge. She used a recipe handed down from her grandmother – a true Cantonese-style Laba congee with sticky rice, peanuts, mung beans, red beans, dried tangerine peel, lotus seeds, and dried dates. I can still picture her stirring the big pot and tasting the porridge by experience (no measuring cups in sight!) to get the sweetness just right. Sometimes she’d add a spoon of brown sugar near the end, Cantonese prefer it a touch sweet. She always set aside a bowl as an offering to our ancestors; even after we moved to Barry, she keeps that tradition by placing a small bowl in front of a family photo of her parents – a quiet moment of remembrance.

One thing we always felt on Laba Day was a sense of gratitude and hope. There’s no gift-giving or fireworks for this festival, just simple acts like enjoying a homemade meal and saying thanks for the year that’s passed. Around the breakfast table, our dad would encourage us to share something we were thankful for from the past year, or a wish for the new year. As a kid I’d usually mumble something about good grades or a new toy I got, but the habit of reflection stuck with me. Now, as adults running our own business, we still take a moment on Laba to appreciate what the year has brought our family and our takeaway. It’s usually a busy time of year for us here (with New Year around the corner we start planning our own celebrations and also any special menu items for Spring Festival), but we try to start Laba morning with that same calm bowl of porridge together, counting our blessings. Our experience of celebrating Laba abroad is a bit different – we can’t easily find all the same ingredients in Barry that we had in Guangzhou, but we make do. We’ve found red beans and peanuts in local shops, and we substitute other dried fruits if we can’t get jujubes. The important part is that we do it, and our kids see us doing it, just as we saw our parents.

Bringing these traditions to Barry has been a joy. Sometimes we’ll invite close friends or neighbours to try our Laba porridge. At first they are surprised that a savory takeaway known for chow mein and crispy beef is suddenly talking about sweet rice porridge! But when they taste it, and when we explain the story behind it, their eyes light up. We’ve had conversations in our shop on Laba Festival that range from explaining Buddha’s enlightenment to discussing how similar Laba porridge is to a British porridge or rice pudding (though ours has beans and nuts, making it more of a whole-meal soup). It’s these cultural exchanges that make our work fulfilling – sharing a bit of our heritage adds a richer context to the food we serve. After all, our business isn’t just about making dishes; it’s about sharing who we areand where we come from. Laba Festival, though small, is a piece of that puzzle.

If you’ve never heard of Laba Festival until now, we hope this introduction has been enlightening (pun intended, since it’s tied to Buddha’s enlightenment!). It’s one of those quieter traditions that many Chinese families keep, whether publicly or just in their own kitchens. For us, it’s a cornerstone of our cultural calendar – a day that reminds us of home, family, and the values of gratitude and generosity. Even here in the UK, we maintain the custom, waking up early to simmer porridge and maybe even jar some garlic in vinegar (who knows, maybe we’ll start that northern tradition in our southern family too).

So next time you visit us in early January, feel free to ask, “Have you had your Laba porridge yet?” – chances are we’ll smile (maybe with a bit of sweet rice still on our breath) and happily share the story again. After Laba, Chinese New Year is just around the corner, and the excitement in our family – and our kitchen – starts to build. We clean up our shop decor a bit, we hang a few more red lanterns, and we start planning our own New Year’s Eve family dinner after closing. But it all starts with Laba Day, that warm bowl of goodness on a cold morning, and the comfort of keeping an old tradition alive. In our little corner of Barry, that tradition continues, and we’re delighted to invite you in to experience it with us.