Chinese New Year without the Lion Dance seems incomplete. Lion dance originated in China approximately thousand years ago. The lion is regarded as a guardian creature. According to legend, a monster was terrorizing a small village and one day, a Buddhist monk visited the village and had witnessed the event that take place. So the monk asks the villagers to build a ‘monster’, cover the whole village in red and also fill bamboo shoots with gunpowder. Next year, when Nian came back, the village’s best martial artists ran out with their ‘monster’ and the rest of the villagers fire the firecrackers. The result: Nian ran away and that its how Lion Dance was created.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSddAqZz9kc