It felt like a big deal that major festivals in both the Chinese and British calendars – Chinese New Year and Pancake Day – happened to fall on the same day this year. But on reflection it doesn’t seem such a coincidence: it’s not unusual for cultures around the world tend to time their festivals around the changing of the seasons.

Chinese New Year is otherwise known as Spring Festival; and Lent (itself derived from a root word meaning spring, as the days start to lengthen) builds up to the springtime celebration of Easter. There are little clues in the celebrations themselves: Chinese New Year is associated with springtime tangerine fruit and peach blossoms; Easter is similarly associated with springtime bunnies and daffodils.

The traditions surrounding spring festivals reflect how our ancestors celebrated the seasonal shifts in the nature around them. Tangerine trees, which display cheery orange fruit just as the season changes, became a natural symbol of the New Year. The wordplay between the Chinese name of the fruit “桔, gat” and the word for luck “吉, gat” also lends itself to the well-wishes of a new year.

Similarly, peach trees open their beautiful blossoms and narcissus plants show their charming yellow and white flowers at this time of year. Looking at it from another angle: lychees are another celebrated local fruit, but are not featured heavily in Chinese New Year decorations because there was never a reason to associate a summer fruit with a spring festival.

Of course cultures change as time goes on; modern supply chains allow for all kinds of new celebrations. The mounds of Ferrero Rocher that adorn the supermarkets at this time of year weren’t a feature of Qing dynasty Lunar New Year celebrations, but are nevertheless quite a charming cultural ambassador from the west.

But there’s one modern change to the season that is less of a reason to celebrate. As the climate changes, the markers of the seasons will also shift. February 2026 saw temperatures failing to dip to traditional winter levels. This may subsequently impact cultural touchpoints: peach blossoms, narcissus buds and tangerine fruits all rely on weather signals to begin ripening.

There is already evidence of that happening elsewhere: Japan’s sakura blossom season is shifting, wrongfooting travellers booking ahead to see them, and Korea’s mandarin orchards (not the same species as the citrus we popularise in Hong Kong at Chinese New Year, but closely related) are suffering from rising temperatures. Even the imported chocolates might be impacted by climate change, as cocoa and hazelnut yields are impacted by irregular weather.

So, it is increasingly difficult to rely on nature to deliver on cue for our festivals. With greenhouses, cold supply chains and clever cultivation techniques it may still be possible to source plants whose blossoms haven’t all withered by the time that New Year rolls around; but these workarounds often involve carbon intensive solutions like refrigeration and long-distance imports.

A reasonable reaction might be to say: “What does it matter if we celebrate Chinese New Year with lychees instead of mandarins? The festival is more about the celebration than it is about individual shibboleths.” I have some sympathy with that argument – after all, Ferrero Rocher has successfully become a respectable new year treat.

But it strikes me as a shame that instead of adding to the richness of the culture, climate change is instead steamrollering the nature that underpinned the culture; and maintaining some semblance of that culture requires increasingly polluting alternatives.

There’s more to worry about than the disappearance of particular shrubs in the flower markets; losing the cooler months is likely to prolong mosquito season. The Food and Environmental Health Department is already making the connection between climate change and the increased risk of mosquito-borne diseases in what should have been cooler months.

We will be able to adapt – hiding from the mosquitoes in air-conditioned apartments while consuming artificially ripened foods instead of seasonal. And, in the grand scheme of things, I appreciate it seems trivial to glom onto the seasonality of fruits with cutesy wordplays.

But it’s worth remembering that climate change is not just going to affect property prices and financial risk – as the world changes its very seasons, the natural world that underpinned cultural mores themselves will increasingly become eroded. Perhaps it’s a harbinger that the year of the Fire Horse is already living up to its name.