There is a shopping spree before the Spring Festival. Shopkeepers stock up New Year goods and spruce up the malls waiting for frantic customers to crowd in. The most favored items are food and decorations.

People also do a thorough cleaning to their houses, which symbolizes a fresh start to the upcoming year.

On the Chinese New Year, families in China decorate their front doors with poetic couplets of calligraphy written with fragrant Indian ink to express the feeling of life's renewal and the return of spring.

It is said that spring couplets originated from "peach wood charms", which were door gods painted on wood charms during ancient times. During the Five Dynasties (907-960), Emperor Meng Chang inscribed an inspired couplet on a peach slat, beginning a custom which gradually evolved into today's popular custom of pasting-up spring couplets.

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Giving Hongbao (red packets or red envelopes) during the Chinese New Year is another tradition.

A red packet is simply a red envelope with gift money in it, which symbolizes luck and wealth. Red packets are symbolically handed out to younger generations by their parents, grandparents, relatives and friends, and usually the immediate family gives Hongbao to the children on New Year's Eve. The pretty envelopes make the present seem more amiable and sincere.

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FROM:CHINADAILY