Japanese people eat a special selection of dishes during the New Year celebration called osechi-ryōri, typically shortened to osechi. This consists of boiled seaweed, fish cakes, mashed sweet potato with chestnut, simmered burdock root, and sweetened black soybeans. Many of these dishes are sweet, sour, or dried, so they can keep without refrigeration—the culinary traditions date to a time before households had refrigerators, when most stores closed for the holidays..【Quoted from Wikipedia】