Today is the first day of spring. Which means it’s also the start of the Persian New Year, or Nowruz. To mark the day, NPR just ran a story about the holiday and the foods that are used to celebrate the occasion.

Nowruz, the Persian New Year, begins at the exact moment of the vernal equinox, when the sun crosses the equator and winter ends. The festivities continue for 13 days.

Nowruz is not a religious holiday. It celebrates fertility and renewal with singing and dancing, visiting friends and relatives, and lots of feasting. It’s got it all: myth and symbolism, fragrant hyacinth and Persian poetry, magic numbers and magic puddings.

What foods are traditionally prepared for Nowruz? Najmieh Batmanglij, a Persian cookbook author, gave NPR the scoop:

Everything is cooked with loads of fresh, spring herbs. She begins and ends the holiday with a soup with noodles that symbolize unraveling the difficulties in the year to come. Cooked with fresh dill, parsley and four pounds of spinach, it tastes like a bowl of spring.

Eggs, of course, represent fertility. So herb kuku with its dozen eggs and six cups of herbs covers all bases. Batmanglij also makes green rice, loaded with herbs and prepared with fresh fava beans. And there is always fish. “It is very important,” she says. “It represents abundance.”

Throughout the holiday, there are plenty of pastries — baklava soaked with rosewater and honey, tiny marzipan berries with a sliver of pistachio for stems, honey almond crunch with saffron, rice cookies with poppy seeds and cloverleaf-shaped chickpea cookies with cardamom.