Feast for the pocketbook

Falling food prices mean cooking at home for the holidays can be a sweet deal this year, Mike Peters reports.

Mindy Yan is trolling the aisles of Jenny's Shop with a big smile. The Chinese-American from San Francisco has enjoyed laying out a Christmas spread every year since her family came to Beijing in 2009, but the cost of a dinner for her own family of three and her sister's family of five has varied wildly over those years.

But 2014 is going to be one of the good years. She'll pay 48 yuan/kilo ($7.71) for her imported turkey instead of last year's 58 yuan. There are imported peas in the freezer, but she'll take the popular Chinese brand Weili instead, hovering between the 250-gram packages (5.5 yuan) and a jumbo 1,000g bag (20.2 yuan). And her favorite taste of the holidays, Ocean Spray cranberry sauce, is 16.9 yuan for a 379-gram can.