Last night was New Year's Eve in the Chinese lunar calendar, which makes today New Year's Day 2000. To celebrate - and you don't have to be Chinese to do so - you should be wearing something red (to ward off evil) and have decorated your home with cut-out paper flowers as well as large bunches of fresh flowers. You'll have already cleaned the whole house, of course, paid off your debts and bought some new clothes to wear.
If you're getting on a bit, now is the time to sit back and enjoy yourself for today is your day, the day on which younger members of the family honour and show respect for their elders and betters. In fact, the only task grandparents have to perform on New Year's Day is to hand out cash gifts, traditionally wrapped in red paper.
There are about 15,000 people of Chinese origin settled in Ireland who came here so long ago that they now have Irish passports. Tonight - unless they're working in the restaurant and takeaway food industry - they'll be celebrating at home with family and friends.
The date of the Chinese New Year is governed by the phases of the moon - there's a new one up there tonight - and traditionally, festivities went on for 15 days until the moon was full and all the food was gone. Nowadays, in China, they'll celebrate for three days but here for only one.
"My grandmother," says Howard Pau, who runs the Asia Market in Dublin's Drury Street, "always ate vegetarian on the first and the 15th day, because she was Buddhist. In those days, without a fridge or freezer, lots of the vegetables were dried in the sun. Then they were put in a big pot of soup with dumplings and layers of bean curd. On the first day, the flavour of the vegetables wouldn't have soaked into the beans so the taste was quite light. The next day, it would be cooked up again by fast boiling, and this made the soup stronger. And so it was, every day, until it was all gone."
Offerings of food were presented to the Buddha - but reclaimed a few days later and eaten. Candles were lit and fireworks let off. "Though now, in big cities," says Xinping Wang, first secretary at the Chinese embassy, "fireworks are banned because they are dangerous and also not good for the environment. They leave a big cloud of gun powder over the cities."
Wang and his colleagues at the embassy will be celebrating with a traditional dish - pork dumplings: "We usually make the dumplings together and eat them together and that brings good luck to everyone. It's also a time when people open fortune sticks to read what the future holds. And they send greeting cards to each other. Though nowadays, many people do that on the Internet.'
I opened my own fortune stick on the web and found its message most auspicious: "This is a good year for travel," it said.
Everyone has their own way of celebrating. The Vietnamese community in Ireland, now numbering about 800, is holding a New Year party on February 8th and expecting 250 people to turn up to eat and dance - to music both traditional and modern. In Korea, according to Soonie Delap who comes from Seoul, they have a speciality which is sliced sausage on a bed of rice - not something you'll get anywhere else.
No one eats anything remotely like Christmas pudding, although there is a pudding made of flour and syrup, sometimes flavoured with vanilla. "And we have another pudding called Eight Ingredients," says Wang, "which is very popular," - although he couldn't recall exactly what all the ingredients were.
Rice wine - really a spirit and very strong - isn't as popular as it used to be. "But any alcohol will do," says Howard Pau airily. "Nowadays, we have such a wide choice."
At the Imperial Restaurant, in Dublin's Wicklow Street, the chef, Yip Kay Yim, who was trained in Hong Kong but has also worked in Singapore, offers roast duck as his special, celebratory dish, accompanied by choy sum and pak choy greens. "And if you have a whole duck or chicken," explains proprietor Koon Ying Chung, "it will come to the table with both its head and tail still on. That's to show the cooking had a good start and a good end. "Though," she adds kindly, "you don't have to eat either."
And to drink with the celebratory meal? "You could take some Shaohsing," says Chung, showing me a bottle of a red, knockout drink from Taiwan, to be sipped like sherry.
The food people eat at the New Year, explains Howard Pau, is pretty much the same as the food they eat at other times - except that the dishes go under a more appropriate name. For instance, there's 100-Year Longevity Noodles, something called Morning Glory and another dish called Auspicious Homecoming. One of the toasts you can give your friends when you tuck into your New Year is: "May you sleep together and have sons". Just be careful who you say it to.
For more on the Chinese New Year, see: www.chinatown-online.co.uk