Cooking for a Happy New fear

The New Year holiday is the happiest day of the year for the Chinese. It is the day when everything begins anew. On this first day of the first month of the lunar calendar, whatever we did was supposed to suggest newness, freshness, a beginning, regeneration, and of course long life and good fortune. On the seventh day of the New Year it was yan yat, everybody’s birthday. We began looking forward to it at the beginning of our twelfth month, counting the days until we would get our “lucky money” from our elders, when we would be able to eat unlimited amounts of sugar cane and sweet dumplings shaped like ancient gold coins, called taels, as well as slices of sweet sugar-and-rice cakes.