The streets of San Francisco were alive with vibrant colors and the sounds of celebration as the city marked the Lunar New Year with its renowned Chinese New Year Parade. This year's event coincidentally overlapped with the NBA All-Star Weekend, turning the city into a bustling hub of local festivities and basketball enthusiasm. According to a SFGate report, the Lunar New Year Parade, which celebrates the Year of the Snake, saw packed streets and buses, with Muni offering free service to accommodate the shoulder-to-shoulder crowds. The celebrations also included an all-day street fair in Chinatown and a grand fireworks display in Union Square.

The San Francisco Chronicle remarked on the parade drawing massive crowds, with thousands lining up along Market Street. Children perched on their parents' shoulders, and enthusiastic onlookers soaked up the lively atmosphere of acrobatic lion dancers and drumming. Chinatown proved to be a major hotspot, with visitors flocking to its stores and restaurants amidst a backdrop of fireworks that lit up the sky in what one long-time parade-goer, Lincoln Anderson, described as "very much a San Francisco thing."

Moreover, the parade exemplified the city's return to festive normalcy, post-pandemic, with Chinatown's businesses like the elusive Golden Gate Bakery and local T-shirt shop T&L thriving in the lunar celebration. As per the San Francisco Chronicle, Jenny Wong of T&L T-shirts observed that this year’s turnout was bigger than any in recent memory, attributing the surge "to the pandemic ending and NBA All-Star Weekend attracting droves of tourists." The event did, however, suffer a setback when a drone show by sponsor Alaska Airlines had to be canceled due to technical difficulties. The celebrations, featuring nearly 100 organizations, culminated in a quintessentially San Franciscan display of unity and cultural pride.