New Year's Eve is the time to put up new Spring Festival couplets for the coming year.

Spring Festival couplets consist of two paper scrolls. Each are inscribed with auspicious cultural adages, pasted vertically on each side of the door. A shorter horizontal scroll is often pasted across the top. Like images of door gods, Spring Festival couplets were thought to protect the household from evil.

According to ancient Chinese folk beliefs, ghosts and demons fear peach wood. Protective charms made of peach wood boards were therefore traditionally hung on either side of the door during the Lunar New Year festival. Later, images of the door gods Shen Tu and Yu Lei were painted on these boards.

During the Five Dynasties Period, Meng Chang, the king of Shu, ordered the scholar Xin Yinxun to copy some of the king's poetry onto a peach wood door charm. However, Xin Yinxun did not approve of the king's literary efforts, and instead inscribed the following lines of his own: "The New Year is filled with holiday cheer; celebrations proclaiming the coming of Spring." This was China's first Spring Festival couplet.

By the time the Ming Dynasty arrived, Spring Festival couplets were popular throughout Chinese society.