Lantern Festival returns to Ukiah
New year\u2019s blessings typically include wishes for a long life. Sunday, the last day of the lunar new year celebrations, coincided with the 115th birthday of Edie Ceccarelli, the third oldest person in the world. \n\nAt Alex Thomas Plaza in Ukiah, the Lantern Festival was back, after three years\u2019 pandemic hiatus. Instilling Goodness Elementary and Developing Virtue Secondary Schools from the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas offered lion and dragon dances, music, art and food for the public.\nThe festivities opened at noon, under the pavilion as a sporadic downpour soaked the streets. To the accompaniment of gongs and cymbals, a black and gold lion opened a scroll announcing the Year of the Water Rabbit, worked up the courage to leap onto a table, and uncovered a plate of treats, which it flung into the crowd.\n\nTeacher H.T. coordinates the dance groups for the boys\u2019 school. He took a quick break between acts to explain the lion dance, as students dashed through the rain to put away their costumes and set up for the Chinese orchestra performance. The celebration opens with a lion dance because, \u201cOnce upon a time, during harvest time,\u201d the farmers came out to find that all their crops had disappeared. So one day, they decided to use gongs and cymbals to scare away whatever had been destroying the crops. The lion dance is something like a spring cleaning ritual, to scare away whatever evil thing that might have bad designs on the crop. \u201cSo that\u2019s why, every Lunar New Year, we start with the lion dance,\u201d he concluded.\n\nThere was another kind of dancing, too. At a long table in what little sunlight there was, Dale, who teaches Chinese at the elementary and secondary schools, was guiding children through what she calls \u201ca dance on the paper.\u201d Calligraphy, she explained, \u201cneeds a lot of practice. But the process is very attractive to me. It\u2019s a different kind of cultivation\u2026It\u2019s good training, to train your focus.\u201d\n\nDale\u2019s focus never wavered, as the orchestra struck up a tune and the rain crashed down sideways. And after years of pandemic, a little rainstorm wasn\u2019t dampening H.T.\u2019s spirits.\n\n\u201cI\u2019m excited for the kids,\u201d he reflected. \u201cBecause they\u2019ve got something to do.\u201d The last three years have been hard, but as he watched the first-year students take their places for their performance, he predicted that, \u201cNow, we\u2019ll be able to get them coming back. You see how they\u2019re working slowly up. And I\u2019m hoping next year and the following year, we\u2019ll get better and better.\u201d \n\nUp the hill in Willits, Edie Ceccarelli, who\u2019s seen more new years than almost everyone who\u2019s ever lived, was being honored with a drive-by birthday parade. Lauren Schmitt from KMUD news talked with Evelyn Persico, a relative and trustee of the super-centenarian, which is what gerontologists call people over 110.\n\n\u201cShe was born at home in 1908,\u201d Persico related. \u201cI can hardly put it into words, what she\u2019s experienced. Her father was a very hard-working man...there were four girls and three boys in the family, and they lived thorough times that were nose to the grindstone, so to speak. He came to the United States from Italy, and he ended up here in Willits working for the railroads. The railroads were just making the racks from the city to Eureka. What they experienced is going back to the Model T Ford to now, to the space age.\n\nEdie was always a very active person\u2026she and her siblings would walk out to the valley here and dig up potatoes for 50 cents a day\u2026her life has been amazingly healthy.\u201d Persico related the famous Ceccarelli tip for a long life: \u201cA glass of wine with dinner, and stay out of other people\u2019s business, just mind your own business, and play. She had a great philosophy\u2026the thing that\u2019s been hard for Edie is that she\u2019s the survivor. Her family, her brothers and sisters, are gone. Her daughter and three granddaughters are gone, and her son-in-law just passed away,\u201d a few years ago. \u201cShe\u2019s the sole survivor. And that is very hard. That\u2019s why she says, why am I still here? I just say, well, God\u2019s not ready for you yet. It\u2019s hard to wrap your head around it, but spending so many years with her now, I feel like God has given me a piece of what he gave to her, because I have loved doing for her, and loving her, and knowing her, and just being a part of her life.\u201d