If you have time to spare this New Year’s Day due to restrictions on visiting and unattractive weather outside, you can do what the ancient Chinese did when facing up to a long, cold winter.
They figured that the winter cold began with the solstice (22 December) and lasted for 81 days. It can be very cold in north China so they put up a ’81 petal picture’ and coloured a petal a day till the period ended.
The petals are always plum blossoms and in Dalgan there is a painting brought from China that gives you an idea of what it looks like (see below).
If you count the petals, there may be more than 81 of them so don’t take this example too literally. However, it does give an idea of what the ‘81 petal picture’ looked like.
If they add up to 99 they could refer to the ‘99 cold elimination diagram’, another Chinese way of calculating the approach of Spring (and passing the time).
So there are two challenge: colour a petal a day or count up the number of petals to see if there are 99!
Wishing you a Great 2022 and hoping you will have something better to do in it, Hugh.