New Year Goods Nian Huo 年货 Chinese Culture

Chinese people do a grand new year shopping spree in January and February near the days of the lunar new year. This shopping spree is called 买年货. Chinese people used to flock to large department stores but now plenty shop online. Taobao.com mobile app updated its icon to look like Sun Wu Kong's Crown - the main monkey character from the classic literature "The Journey West", acknowledging the zodiac year of the monkey in 2016. Much like its Japanese counterpart, this year Taobao designed many cartoon characters to go with this major shopping event, see the picture below, including the gods of fortune, the black cat of TMall - Tian Mao etc.