The parade is always a lot later.
Do you mean why Chinese New Year isn’t celebrated on what the Western world considers to be New Year’s Day?
Because Chinese New Year doesn’t fall on January 1. The date changes because the calendar it’s based on is a lunar calendar. The festival is 15 days long and begins on the day of the 2nd new moon after the Winter Solstice.
Pahleez! Nobody’s that dumb :rolleyes:
That’s the way I read your question. Perhaps you should have worded it more clearly. Define “new year’s day”.
I agree with John Mace. If you didn’t mean what jayjay said, then what is your question?
That’s the way I read it too! Or maybe you are wondering why the date changes, in which case the explanation is that the festival is based on the lunar calendar.
Read the OP’s post again. He’s asking why the Chinese New Year’s Parade isn’t on the first day of the Chinese New Year.
It’s not the clearest of questions, but it makes sense to me.
Unfortunately, I don’t have the answer, just trying to clear this up and get the thread back on track.
Stick around. 
Thanks for the explanation. I asked someone yesterday why the date doesn’t move more than it does. Neither of us knew that it was tied to the Winter Solstice.
In Beijing and Shanghai this year, there were many fireworks in the streets at midnight on Lunar New Year’s Eve. This was because fireworks were allowed for the first time in 12 years.
However, in Chinatowns across the country, the big deal is in Feb. Seems like that would be a real anticlimax if you came here from China.
Chinese New Year parades are a culmination of New Year’s celebration, to be held at the end of the observation, rather than our Western one day bang up.
Here’s a nice link with explaination The first part of the Chinese New Year is to be spent with family,and from the explaination in that link, seems very close to the Western celebration of Christmas as time of togetherness and reflection. Makes sense, too, that that type of holiday would occur in the cold months, when the hunker down of winter wants for promise of the new, be it Spring or Western Christ hopes.
Not sure of why the parade is held at the end of the holiday, perhaps because then everyone is sated and happy with home festivity, and then a parade has greater meaning to the community as a culmination of events. Guess it’s a millenia honed tradition.
As China comes on out to the hubub of the world, I’d expect the parade tradition to become more intense and flashy , like it has in the US.