2024, Year of the Wood Dragon: Celebrating Losar, the Himalayan New Year

Bhutan Himalaya
Feb 6, 2019
3 min read

Updated: Feb 10, 2024

Losar is a time for fun, family, and feasting in Bhutan. Unlike the West, where people may stay up all night to party, the start of the lunar year in Bhutan is a mostly daytime affair.

People wake early in the morning to bathe and put on fresh new clothes they’ve put away during the past year in carefully locked boxes, trunks, and closets for just such a special occasion.

A Bhutanese girl in traditional finery enjoying her celebratory new year meal. — A Bhutanese girl in traditional finery enjoying her celebratory new year's meal. ©Bhutan Himalaya Archives

The first meal of the day is usually thuep, thick rice congee with spicy mala seasoning flavored by bone marrow, soft cubes of cottage cheese, and tender, well-cooked chunks of meat, usually pork or beef. It’s a dense umami concoction that’s at once savory, tingly, and filling, a great way to start this celebratory day. In some families, the day also begins with thrue, a purifying bath or shower to rinse off the negative karma of the previous year, followed by thuen or moenlam, a short prayer or dedication to welcome a prosperous new year. Daytime festivities include da-tsey or archery, the national sport, played mostly by men, and khuru or throwing darts that are enjoyed by monks (there being no injunctions against games of marksmanship in the Buddhist clergy) as well as by lay people.

Bhutanese men celebrate the new year playing archery and throwing darts while family members act as audience and cheering squad. — Bhutanese men celebrate the new year playing archery and throwing darts while their families act as audience and cheering squad. © Bhutan Himalaya Archives

If, in other parts of the world, New Year parties are a time to go out, in Bhutan, the holiday is more akin to an American Thanksgiving. It’s a time when families gather and stay home to eat delicious and endless quantities of food throughout the day. Lunch usually arrives with a great deal of fanfare, featuring the season's best cereals, depending on the elevation—rice, wheat, roasted barley, dough, or buckwheat. Yak, beef, pork or chicken, and sometimes fish are served in prosperous homes. In the more religiously observant homes, a gathering of monks will usually perform ceremonies for barchey lamdoey, “which may loosely be translated as “prayers for the purification of diseases, obstacles, and misfortunes.” In such homes, the esteemed monks are invited to take frequent breaks during the day to join the family in the feasting. Renewed by such delicious food and drink, the monks will often be seen to resume their chanting, the blowing of ceremonial horns and reed pipes, and the beating of their drums and cymbals with renewed vigor and energy. Afternoon tea, with Indian-style sweet milk tea as well as salty Himalayan butter tea or suja—which is more like a broth—arrives with khabzoey, or crispy, mildly sweet deep-fried dough cakes.

Devout Bhutanese Buddhists believe they gain merit by inviting monks to their homes and sharing the new year festivities, which include the lighting of auspicious butter lamps. © Bhutan Himalaya Archives

Dinner is usually preceded by ara, home-brewed traditional rice wine, or singchang, fermented barley beer. By this time everyone will have grown considerably rosier in the cheeks and louder and much more convivial in their mannerisms, and a good old game of playing cards, or sho (a Himalayan game similar to mahjong played with dice) may well ensue. Even the monks, if they're still around and well-known to the family, may join the general rounds of speculation over the most strategic placements of the (sho) pieces in the game!

Despite what people may believe about Himalayan Buddhists, the new year's spread will almost certainly have some meat dishes including dried yak, beef or chicken garnished with dried red (hot) chili peppers. © Bhutan Himalaya Archives

More food is served at dinner—red rice, bright red chilies, and a variety of spicy stews including the national chili-cheese dish ema datsi, and long strips of shakam or dried beef, yak or pork—until everyone is stuffed. Copious amounts of drinking follows. The mostly home-brewed alcohol, imbibed by one and all finally brings the festivities to a close with the flushed red-cheeked faces of everyone giving evidence to their glistening hopes for a happy and healthy year!

A selection of traditional and modern Bhutanese eats, including momos or steamed dumplings, bone broth, fried eggs and wild shiitake. — A selection of traditional and modern Bhutanese eats, including momos or steamed dumplings, bone broth, fried eggs and sautéed wild shiitake mushrooms. © Bhutan Himalaya Archives

In the Lunar Calendar of the Himalayas, which largely corresponds with the Chinese one with some differences, 2024 is the Year of the Wood Dragon. According to traditional astrology, the foundational characteristics of the Wood Dragon Year are prosperity, daring, energy, and opportunity.

A traditional dinner with our guests at the famous Folk Heritage Restaurant, run by the well-known food curator Kesang Choeden. — A traditional dinner with our guests and government dignitaries at the famous Folk Heritage Restaurant, run by the well-known food curator Kesang Choeden. © Bhutan Himalaya Expeditions

Some people believe that Losar celebrations predated Buddhism in the Himalayas. The traditional practice of burning incense and juniper as a New Year's offering to the spirits and protective deities is believed to be an artifact of the animistic Bon practices that existed before the arrival of Buddhism. In Tibet, the celebrations are sometimes called Boed Gyalpoi Losar, which means “the Tibetan New Year of the King.” This is a reference to the belief that Losar was first celebrated following the coronation of Tibet's first king. In another story, Losar was first celebrated after a woman named Boed Ma (Tibetan Mother) invented the Himalayan lunar calendar. In some parts of the Himalayas, it was also believed to have been celebrated as an autumn festival at the time of "the flowering of the apricot trees."