The Palace Museum (Photo/Chinanews.com)

Different from the previous years situation, this year, Liu Ling’s family reunited in Guangzhou, the city where Liu works, for the Spring Festival. Then, on the 6th day of the family reunion, Liu drove her parents to the airport where they boarded the airplane to go back home in southwest China’s Sichuan province.

It’s not rare that Chinese parents are nowadays migrating to the places where their children work for the purpose of family reunions during the Spring Festival period. During the festival travel rush, the Guangzhou South Railway Station saw 188,000 arrivals per day on average, 30 percent more than the same period last year.

As a result of this unique way of celebrating the Spring Festival, ticket bookings to Chinese cities, including Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, and Hangzhou saw a year-on-year increase of 40 percent in the week before the Spring Festival.

Buying foreign products to enrich dinner tables

Another feature of the holiday is that more and more foreign products are appearing on Spring Festival dinner tables. Alaska king crabs, French blue lobsters, cherries from Chile and fresh milk from Australia, which are easy to buy, have added exotic flavors to family reunion dinners.

A report regarding 2019 Spring Festival shopping trends released by JD’s in-home delivery services provider indicates that quality has replaced price to become the top factor that people are concerned about when considering Spring Festival purchases.

In addition, new forms of consumption, such as online shopping, tailored shopping, experiential consumption, and smart consumption have emerged around the festival.

Data provided by the Ministry of Commerce (MOC) indicated that from last Monday to Sunday, the total sales of retail and catering enterprises in China reached a new high of 1 trillion yuan ($150 billion), thereby growing by 8.5 percent year on year.

Museums have become must-visit spots

This Spring Festival, Xu Donglei brought his children to the Palace Museum to experience the New Year customs displayed there, such as pasting New Year paintings and worshipping Caishen, the Chinese god of fortune.

From early January on, the Palace Museum held an exhibition to display 885 pieces or sets of cultural relics. The activity attracted more than 500,000 visitors during the 7-day Spring Festival holiday, according to the MOC.

Museums, art galleries, libraries, science and technology museums and history and culture streets received 40.5 percent, 44.2 percent, 40.6 percent and 18.4 percent of tourists during the holiday, according to statistics provided by China Tourism Academy.

Watching a movie has become a fashion during the holiday

Eight movies hit nationwide cinemas on the first day of the Lunar New Year, achieving a record high single-day box office gross sales of 1.4 billion yuan.

The Chinese sci-fi blockbuster "The Wandering Earth" has earned over 1.59 billion yuan since its release on Tuesday as of Sunday, according to China Movie Data Information Network. During the holiday, 110 million people watched movies in cinemas, contributing to a national box office of more than 5 billion yuan.