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Waiting for New YearThroughout New Year¡¯s Eve, all members of a family get together to enjoy themselves to their heart¡¯s content through varied entertainments while all rooms are illuminated by red candles and decorated by colorful lanterns. This custom is referred to as waiting for New Year, an expression of a strong attachment to the old year and looking for the coming year.
Secondly, giving coins to children as New Year gifts. Children of a family are given such coins by their seniors at the midnight of New Year¡¯s Eve when the former make a bow with clasped hands and kowtow to the latter as a symbol of tribute on the festive occasion. The coins are strung into the shape of a dragon with red thread, suggesting seniors¡¯ wish to see juniors win success in their future careers. Thirdly, hiding a hook. It is a game, in which some players hide a hook or a finger ring or a ring-like object while others seek it, with the object of finding. Other merry-making items for the night are playing mahjong, playing Chinese dominoes, riding a bamboo pole imagined a toy horse, playing a hawk-catching-chick game, whipping a top, etc. Now it is very popular that people across the country enjoy the evening party programs given by CCTV while they have light refreshments and drinks.
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The festive activities for the night are varied and colorful. Firstly, taking a family reunion feast. Such a feast, a symbol of a family reunion as the expression suggests, is to be taken by all members of a family. Even those out on business, if any, would have to hurry back for it. The feast is sumptuous. Two indispensable foods on the menu are the New Year cake for the southerners and jiazi for the northerners, the former being made of glutinous rice flour and the latter being dumplings with meat and vegetable stuffing. Both of the foods symbolize auspiciousness, as the Chinese term for the New Year cake is niangao, which is homonymous with a Chinese expression meaning a venerable age while jiaozi looks like a shoe-shaped sliver ingot. At the feast a kind of wine named tusu is usually drunk. The custom has a legend behind.According to About Custom by Shen Yue (441-513), a writer in Liang period of the Southern Dynasty, a hermit lived in a 
thatched cottage named Tusu in ancient times. Whenever New Year¡¯s Eve approached, he gave his neighbors a dose of Chinese medicine, and told them to soak it in well water for a night and drink the water the following morning. The neighbors did as they had been told and, as a result, all lived a long life without any trouble. Thinking that the medicine had the effect to prevent pestilence and other diseases, the neighbors made medicinal liquor with the medicine to be drunk at the family reunion feast.