House Cleaning

After the Spring Festival provisions have been brought home, it's time to make further preparations for the holiday. These may include slaughtering pigs, packing blood sausage, making tofu, steaming New Year's sticky rice cakes, and making fry bread. This must all be done in advance, since no cooking may be done from New Year's Eve until well into the first month of the new year. As a result, starting at Little New Year, families everywhere are caught up in preparations for the New Year's holiday. A saying popular in Beijing vividly expresses the holiday spirit of China's Spring Festival: "Eat sticky candy on the twenty-third; sweep clean the house on the twenty-fourth; fry up tofu on the twenty-fifth; stew some mutton on the twenty-sixth; kill the rooster on the twenty-seventh; set dough to rise on the twenty-eighth; steam mantou buns on the twenty-ninth; stay up all night on New Year's Eve; pay holiday visits on New Year's Day."