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. Before New Year's Eve, prepare the New Year's dinner in advance, put it in a bamboo basket, put oranges, Wuling, water chestnut, gold ingot cakes and other fruits on it, and insert pine and cypress branches, which is called "New Year's dinner". This is the custom in Jiangnan area.
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 people in jiaozi put sugar in their bellies with the intention of eating a sweet New Year. Some people put peanuts (called longevity fruit) in their stomachs with the intention that people can live longer after eating them; There is a kind of jiaozi, which is full of money. The intention is 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 life a "high year after year". Sweet-scented osmanthus sugar rice cakes in Suzhou, Shuimo rice cakes in Ningbo, jujube rice cakes in Beijing and Baiguo rice cakes are all good for the New Year.