Every year around this time, I read a slew of Lunar New Year food articles that all say the same thing. I’ve written plenty of them myself, and this time I’m not going to tell you what you already know.

You already know that you eat fish to celebrate the Lunar New Year because the Chinese word for fish (“yu”) sounds like the word for abundance.

You probably already know to eat that fish whole, with its head and fins still attached, because wholeness represents the completeness of the year, and good fortune from beginning to end. The same applies to whole chickens, ducks and suckling pigs.

Maybe you’re already making dumplings or spring rolls because they resemble purses and gold bars, and you’re aware that dumpling-making at new year is a tradition for families around the world, including my own despite the fact that I end up making 99 per cent of the dumplings because everyone else in my family loses interest about 15 minutes in.

I could tell you that pomelo is lucky because in Chinese (“you”) sounds like the word meaning “to have”, or that eating long noodles is symbolic of living a long life, but you’ve probably heard all that before.

I’m sure at some point I’ve previously told you about yee sang, the recent tradition of raw fish salad that originated in Singapore and Malaysia, where people toss the salad high in the air with chopsticks to raise their luck as high as possible.

I could tell you about all of these things – again – but I’m not going to because I question how useful it is to have an in-depth understanding of homophones in a language you don’t speak, and anyway, there is one issue that is much more important.

Lunar New Year is a time to get together with family. We travel home from around the world to celebrate together and hold a big family reunion dinner on New Year’s Eve. Much Chinese culture is based in Confucian philosophy, and Confucius was an advocate of feasting as a means to build unity of families, and even politically. But as important as it is, if you thought family togetherness was the main focus of the new year, you’d be wrong still.

The truth is that Lunar New Year is about one thing and one thing only … cold, hard cash.

Everything I’ve mentioned so far boils down to money – as a way to represent it in food form, wish it into existence or attract it into your life. As Ronny Chieng rightly says, the translation of the traditional Chinese New Year’s greeting of “gong xi fa cai” is quite literally, “hope you get rich”.

The main purpose of Lunar New Year is to get your life to rain money like in a rap video, and writing another Lunar New Year article that ignored this point would be like me telling you that the true meaning of Christmas was ham.

Hong bao (red packets) are given by adults to children (technically, from married people to unmarried ones) in a system of giving that is truly perfect in its efficiency. Imagine Christmas without having to buy or wrap presents, but where everyone gets exactly what they want, and generational wealth transfer happens in the right direction.

If you really want to make your Lunar New Year dinner authentic, you need to get to your Asian grocer and pick up some red packets, then head to the bank and withdraw crisp new notes to fill your packets with legal tender. Notes, not coins, and preferably in odd-numbered multiples.

To keep that money flowing, act as rich as possible during your new year feast by eating very expensive things. Bringing greater prosperity into your life by buying expensive food may not make much practical sense, nor be ideal news during a cost of living crisis, but if you’ve got a nice bottle of wine you’ve been saving, now’s the time to break it out.

While you’re at it, why not make a batch of XO sauce? It was invented in Hong Kong during the capitalist boom years of 1980s that is intended just to be a collection of the most expensive ingredients you can find.

Whole lobsters and crab are also common LNY flexes, but making them at home can at least save you the eye-watering retail mark-up.

I love Lunar New Year, but perhaps not as much as my kids, who know that shortly they’ll sit down with everyone they know and love to eat a decadent feast of lobster noodles with XO sauce, whole steamed fish, roast pork belly and dumplings before being handed packets of cash and being told the same thing I’ll tell you now: “I hope you get rich.”