People in the north eat more dumplings during the Spring Festival.
It is customary to eat dumplings at New Year’s Eve in the north, which means to say goodbye to the Stove Lord, and the meaning is "send off dumplings and face the wind". When offering the offering, the dumplings should be placed neatly on the offering table. In addition, there is a saying among the people that "dumplings are not as delicious as dumplings". During the Spring Festival, dumplings have become an indispensable delicacy.
Dumplings are gradually taking over New Year’s Eve dinners in many northern provinces and cities, but there is one exception: Henan. In Henan, every family has to cook and eat it by themselves, which is almost synonymous with Xiaonian. In the Shandong and Western Shandong regions, there is a folk song called "Twenty-three, Sticky Cake Sticky". Every year on the 23rd day of the twelfth lunar month, every family steams sticky cakes and eats sticky cakes, which means to stick the Stove King's mouth and let him say good things to heaven and not bad things to the world. The sticky cake is made of yellow rice, red dates, etc., which is sweet, chewy, and soft in the mouth. It means "good luck every year" and auspicious meaning. There is a saying in northwest Shanxi that "eat sesame candy when you are twenty-three, and gnaw your fingers on sesame candy if you are not enough". It is said that Xiaonian is the day when the Kitchen God goes to heaven. He goes to heaven to report to the emperor the food and clothing consumption of the world in the past year and other things that the emperor wants to know. It is also the day when the Kitchen God reports his duties. The purpose of eating sesame candy is to prevent the Kitchen God's mouth from being stuck with the candy and not being able to report the delicious and luxurious scenes in the world to heaven, so as not to punish people who love eating and drinking and bring famine to the New Year. I look forward to a happy new year. A peaceful and abundant year has come. In the southeastern part of Shanxi Province, the custom of eating fried corn is popular. There is a folk proverb that goes, "On the 23rd, if you don't eat fried corn, you will eat it in one pot at the beginning of the new year." People like to bind the fried corn with maltose and freeze it into large pieces, which tastes crispy and sweet.