going to the market is a prelude to the Chinese New Year. At that time, near the Spring Festival, parents would always discuss and go to the market to buy old things such as brooms and curtains for their families, but they mainly bought delicious food such as melon seeds, peanuts, sugar, meat and vegetables. At this time, most mothers are most entangled in adding new clothes to their children. Especially for families with financial difficulties, most of them will choose to pull back a few feet of cloth and entrust relatives and friends with tailoring skills to help sew it, which will bring some surprises to children who are looking forward to a year. In an era when food and clothing are not abundant, it is a very shameful thing for adults and children to have no new clothes during the Chinese New Year.
when it comes to eating, like most northern urban and rural areas, the food festival in Baoding children's eyes decades ago was a prelude from an early age. Most people know the tradition of "offering candied melons to the stove on the 23rd day of the twelfth lunar month". Although many families can't feel the ceremony of sending "Kitchen God", most housewives will buy candied melons and other snacks from this day, attracting children to look at those candied melons that should have been enjoyed by Kitchen God, which is a bit drooling and funny.
After the Chinese New Year, the food preparation for the Chinese New Year is officially started. Many staple foods such as steamed rice cakes and steamed buns were prepared in advance. At that time, the refrigerator was still a myth, and the cold weather in the north could play a very good role in keeping fresh. Make a good staple food-adults don't have to work too hard during the Chinese New Year.
thirty or forty years ago, there were no cooking tools such as pressure cookers and rice cookers. Stewing meat and cooking fish were also carried out in advance, and the specific time of each arrangement was different. Often, there are bursts of fragrance under the eaves of someone's house, and when a neighbor walks by, he asks loudly: Have you started stewing meat? The housewife replied loudly with a big smile. Naughty children at home are running around the pot like kittens. Mothers who are infected by the atmosphere of the New Year are in a better mood. They often yell at each other in their mouths, but they open the pot cover and first take out two pieces with chopsticks to relieve their hunger.
Northern China has always paid attention to "going home to catch up with jiaozi for 31 nights", even if it's over the New Year. Therefore, the old Baoding people attach great importance to these two meals on the 31th night and the morning of the first day, and in the past, most families ate jiaozi at home for these two meals. The family sat around the table, and the young and the old laid hands on him * * * with jiaozi, and then waited for the steaming jiaozi to serve. Male elders sometimes drank a little wine and happily exchanged their experiences and feelings over the past year. That kind of scene and atmosphere had a different taste compared with today's Chinese New Year's forms, which are often eaten in hotels and even sung and reveled by young people.
According to the old rules, this meal in jiaozi on New Year's Day is the first meal for the whole family in the New Year, with special emphasis on the meaning of "reunion". Because of the special meaning of "making money into treasure, not letting blessings flow out", this meal in jiaozi, in the past years when customs were conservative, not only excluded outsiders, but even married daughters could not come back to eat. Today, it seems that this is a bad habit.
I still remember that when my mother wrapped jiaozi in Grade 31 and Grade 1, she often wrapped a fruit candy, peanuts and even coins in several jiaozi-the old people said that it was copper coins at first, and said that according to folk customs, whoever ate this "stuffed" jiaozi would be more blessed. After a lapse of forty years, the author still remembers the expression on my little sister's face when she held up her hands and reported to her mother with a coin in her mouth and endured the pain of biting her teeth.
After the 31th and 1st day, firecrackers are still popping up one after another, and the theme of eating during the Spring Festival is far from over. Throughout the first month, the children's eyes will always find those interesting and delicious targets when relatives and families walk around each other, and when the lions and stilts are held in the villages. Although the food in northern China is similar to a great extent, people in other places can't enjoy the delicious food of Baoding Sugar-Coated Berry, Sugar Man Noodle and Baked Sweet Potato. As for Dingxing's cornmeal pancakes, Anxin's mangzi, chicken's head, old water chestnut and other county food characteristics, it is beyond the short space of this article.