People’s Daily: On New Year’s Eve, everything you eat and don’t eat has a head start.
The Spring Festival is the most important festival in Chinese. One of the most important contents of the Spring Festival is the New Year’s Eve dinner.
Dinner on New Year’s Eve is called New Year’s Eve.
New Year’s Eve is very important, and many places call it "family fun", which is an important family banquet. Amid the cheerful firecrackers and the laughter and laughter of the Spring Festival Gala broadcast by CCTV, it is the warmest and happiest moment in the world for the whole family to sit together, share wine and delicacies, and bid farewell to the old year and welcome the new year together. Especially for the elderly, the reunion of their families has comforted and satisfied them spiritually. Looking at healthy children and lively and lovely children and grandchildren, the smile of the elderly is more stretched and warm than ever.
It can be said that the New Year’s Eve dinner is the most delicious, sweet and sometimes the most expensive dish in a year. More than 30 years ago, people were looking forward to the Chinese New Year. In a way, they were looking forward to this "big meal". Children, in particular, entered the "twelfth lunar month" gate and counted them with their fingers. I remember when I was a child, most of the neighbors in the courtyard were living in poverty, and there were few opportunities to eat meat and fish at ordinary times, not to mention those famous cooking and fancy pasta. When friends get together and talk about eating good food, they are all looking forward to the New Year, especially the New Year’s Eve. The dishes of New Year’s Eve are the most in a year, both vegetarian and cold and hot. Generally, there are at least 8 dishes and more than a dozen. Only then will the adults let the children eat.
In fact, the so-called good things that were eaten at the New Year’s Eve dinner in those days are as common as ever at today’s dinner table, and can be eaten every day. But not then. Because of the lack of materials, most of them are supplied by ticket. Even if you have some money, you can’t buy what you want. Pork, fish, peanut oil, preserved eggs, beer, sugar, tea, etc. are all rationed according to the population or family, and supplied by ticket. National Day, New Year’s Day and Spring Festival sometimes increase the supply items and quantity, for example, each person can supply half a catty of pork, and each household can buy two jins of candy and several boxes of Daqianmen cigarettes. Many families will "diet" and "cut down on meat" during the period near the Chinese New Year. I haven’t seen meat stars in the dishes for more than ten days, so I should eat as little white flour as possible and keep steamed buns. Pork tickets are saved and bought at one time on the eve of Chinese New Year. In this way, in addition to keeping the bag for jiaozi, you can also stir-fry rice flour meat and even stew braised pork. Once such a "reduced" stomach is released, it is followed by a sharp increase in gastrointestinal diseases. Every year on the 30th, the hospital is very busy. The patient has nothing else, most of which are the problems that come out. In the final analysis, it is the word "poor" that caused the disaster.
More importantly, the New Year’s Eve is an auspicious day for family reunion. On New Year’s Eve, no matter how far apart and how busy the work is, people always want to go back to their homes, have a reunion dinner and meet their loved ones who miss them so much. Spring Festival travel rush is the largest and most spectacular "migration" to go home in the world, and those "migration troops" who have worked tirelessly and traveled long distances in anxious to return all expect to arrive before the New Year’s Eve. The New Year’s Eve dinner has become a signal and beacon to call people home, which goes far beyond the meaning of a meal. In some families, you will see such a scene: there is a seat and a pair of chopsticks in front of the dining table, but no one is there. This means that the relatives of this family did not arrive in time for various reasons, or could not go home to reunite with their relatives, but the family could not forget him. Put tables, chairs, bowls and chopsticks, and take the right to be a relative among them. Therefore, many dishes on the New Year’s Eve are also born from this. "Reunion", "family happiness" and "good luck at the head" all contain the wish to pray for family safety and happiness.
Many people are very particular about the New Year’s Eve dinner, and they have everything to say about whether they eat or not. Even in the era of food shortage, people showed their magical powers and tried their best to get symbolic food for good luck. Of course, every nation has its own customs and habits, and there are great differences between the north and the south. For example, southerners like to eat rice dumplings, rice cakes, glutinous rice balls, and some eat raw garlic and preserved eggs. Among them, the meaning of rice cake is the most obvious: "sticky (sticky) high (cake) every year", which is auspicious and wishful, and is interpreted as the meaning of rising year by year. The traditional food of northerners is mainly pasta, and jiaozi is the most common Chinese New Year food, which is also a traditional habit with a long history. Some say that it appeared as early as the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, some say that it was officially listed as a must-eat thing for the New Year from the Han Dynasty, and some say it was the Tang Dynasty. In many places, on New Year’s Eve, when the bell rings at twelve o’clock, they begin to eat jiaozi. Therefore, it is the time of the year, which means "making friends at a younger age", and because the white-flour jiaozi is shaped like a silver ingot, and a pot of pots on the table symbolizes "making a fortune in the New Year, and the ingot rolls in", so many people will go to the bank in advance to change some brand-new coins, or sterilize the old coins with boiling water and pack them into jiaozi with stuffing. This has great appeal to children. On New Year’s Eve, no matter how sleepy or tired I am, I just wait to eat jiaozi and eat coins, and I am happy. Then there is fish, which is also indispensable for the New Year’s Eve, and you can’t eat it all. You have to leave a little, which means "more than one year."
With the improvement of living standards, people’s attitude towards New Year’s Eve has become more and more persistent, more and more loving and, of course, more rational. Those who go out to work, work outside the home, and relatives who are temporarily separated from their families for various reasons, whether they have made a fortune or are down and out of luck, are heading for home near the end of the year, all looking forward to catching up with this extraordinary dinner. However, few people bother about the New Year’s Eve. Because people don’t care what they eat or drink, and they don’t look forward to the delicious food that they can enjoy on the New Year’s Eve as before. The New Year’s Eve dinner has gone far beyond the simple appetite temptation. People are more concerned about and attached to the feelings between their loved ones and the warmth of home brought by the New Year’s Eve dinner. These are the most abundant New Year’s Eve dinners!
People’s Daily (January 29, 2014, 24th edition)