Lunar New Year meme maker

What this page is, and what it is not

This is an English-language meme maker. It is not a greeting-card generator and it is not a substitute for the greetings you would send in your own language. The captions are written for the group chats where family and friends mix languages, which is why the templates use objects — dumplings, envelopes, lanterns — rather than text baked into the artwork.

Searches for this holiday split three ways in English: Lunar New Year, Chinese New Year and Spring Festival. The same templates serve all three, so the page does not pretend they are separate products. If you are sending a greeting rather than a joke, write it in the language you would actually use.

The reunion dinner audit

The reunion dinner is the most meme-able part of the holiday because everyone at the table knows the script. The food arrives in rounds, the seating is a negotiation, and somewhere between the third course and the fruit, a relative asks the question you have been avoiding all year.

The two-caption format suits this perfectly: the polite answer on top, the honest answer underneath. Keep the relative generic — “A RELATIVE” rather than a name — so the joke stays about the situation.

• DINNER AT SIX / THE FIRST PLATE ARRIVED AT NINE
• HOW IS WORK? / IT IS A JOB, THANK YOU
• WHEN ARE YOU GETTING MARRIED? / THE DUMPLINGS ARE GREAT
• ONE MORE BOWL / I HAVE HAD FOUR
• THE TABLE SEATS TWELVE / THERE ARE NINETEEN OF US
• GRANDMA’S PORTIONS / NOT A SUGGESTION
• THE PHOTO TAKES TEN MINUTES / EVERYONE BLINKS ONCE

Red envelopes: keep the joke kind

Red-envelope jokes are funny when they are about the ritual — the polite refusal, the insistence, the envelope that ends up back in your bag — and uncomfortable when they are about how much is inside. Avoid amounts, avoid comparisons between relatives, and avoid anything that reads as a complaint about a gift.

The Envelope Standoff template is built for exactly that exchange: two hands, one envelope, no number. It works whether the joke is about a parent, an aunt or the friend who insists on giving your child one too.

Bilingual captions without breaking the layout

Both caption zones are plain text, so you can mix scripts in one line if your chat does. Keep the line short: the square templates are designed for four to eight words, and a bilingual line doubles quickly. If a caption needs both languages, put one language on top and the other underneath rather than squeezing them into a single line.

Font rendering follows the device. Simplified and traditional Chinese characters render with the system font, so a caption that looks right on your phone will look right for most people in the same chat. Preview before exporting if the line mixes scripts.

Sending it: square, small, and on time

Group chats for this holiday are often WhatsApp, WeChat or iMessage, and they are often busy. Export the square 1080 PNG so it previews without a tap, and keep a GIF under the size where a chat app stops autoplaying — the editor targets roughly 2 MB and falls back to 480 px when a template is too detailed.

The window is the week before the holiday and the day of the reunion dinner. After that, the same jokes still work, but the chat has moved on to the next thing.

Short answers