About ten days before the festival, people began to buy new year's goods, such as chicken, duck, fish, tea, wine and oil sauce, roasted seeds and nuts in the north and south, and fruit with sugar bait. It is a custom in the south of the Yangtze River to prepare the New Year's dinner in advance, put it in a bamboo basket, put fruits such as red orange, Wuling, water chestnut and gold ingot cake on it, and insert pine and cypress branches, which is called "New Year's dinner".
Northerners' New Year's Eve dinner is made of gold, silver and rice (yellow rice and white rice). The dinner was decorated with dates, chestnuts, longan and fragrant branches, with pine and cypress branches inserted. Northerners eat jiaozi in the Spring Festival. Some jiaozi stuffing with sugar, intended to eat the sweetness of the New Year; Some stuffing put peanuts (called longevity fruit), the intention is that people who eat can live longer; There is a coin in a dumpling stuffing, which means that whoever eats it will get rich. jiaozi is shaped like an ingot. During the Chinese New Year, jiaozi is cooked in the inner strip, which is called "Gold thread wears gold ingots".
Auspicious language should be used in New Year's diet. Jiangnan people make tea for their guests in the New Year, and put two olives on the tea tray or bowl cover, which is called "treasure-free tea". When eating in the New Year, there must be cooking, saying that eating "kissing hot"; Be sure to eat bean sprouts, because the shape of bean sprouts is like "Ruyi"; You must eat fish heads for every meal, but you can't eat them all. This is the so-called "leftover fish".
You must eat rice cakes during the Spring Festival, and the wind is the same in the north and south. Eat rice cakes and wish your life a "high year after year". Suzhou's sweet-scented osmanthus rice cakes, Ningbo's Shuimo rice cakes, Beijing's red jujube rice cakes and Baiguo rice cakes are all good New Year's cakes. Many areas in China pay attention to eating rice cakes during the Spring Festival. The rice cake, also known as "rice cake", is homophonic with "high year by year", which means that people's work and life are improving year by year.