In early February, every household had already begun preparing supplies for the New Year.
Life was getting better with each passing year, and every family's New Year provisions were growing more plentiful. In the past, slaughtering a chicken and buying two kilograms of meat to make dumplings had counted as a good New Year.
Now, not just in the Fourth Team but in most households across the township, people spent seven or eight days before the New Year frying dough pastries, steaming buns and stuffed buns, and braising meat. Not every family raised pigs, but when pigs were slaughtered for the New Year, almost all the meat was bought up by those who did not.
During this period, when children went looking for one another to play, their parents would warn them beforehand not to go inside anyone else's home. They were to call from outside, lest people think they had come in asking for food.
Whenever children did come into a house where people were frying food or braising meat, they would almost always be given some. It amounted to two opposite extremes: people kept their own children from visiting other homes for fear of a misunderstanding, yet when someone else's children came over, they insisted on packing them some food.
It was much the same in the cities as in the countryside. Gu Xiaoxia had tied on an apron and was busy working with Sister Yang in the courtyard.
The Dried Meat Processing Workshop had stopped work on the fifteenth day of the twelfth lunar month. They had settled the temporary workers' wages and told them to come back after the Lantern Festival.
After that, the two women mainly prepared food for the New Year.
Although Li Long and Gu Xiaoxia would return to the Team for the