Celebrating Tết – Vietnam’s Largest Holiday

It was the second New Year we have celebrated in under 2 months! Lunar New Year is very important to a majority of Asia where it represents a new start. Prior to the New Year, preparations begin where families start cleaning their homes, buying flowers and decorations, and traveling back to their home towns for a get together. In Vietnam, Lunar New Year is known as Tết and as we travel around the city, we have seen many Tết decorations. I noticed decorations were being put out over a week before the holiday. Huge flower markets were everywhere and decorations at the end of streets. We saw people in our condo building who were bringing up tons of flowers and other decorations up to their home. Our lobby is decorated with beautiful flowers and there are Tết photo displays set up around the outside of the building.

Lunar New Year
In Asia, people don’t celebrate New Year on January 1st, it is celebrated on different days each year typically ranging from January 21 to February 20 . This is because they use a calendar based on the moon cycles causing the date to be different each year. This year, New Year fell on February 17th. The Lunar New Year calendar is in a 12 year cycle where every year is represented with a rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog, or pig. Each one will take place every 12 years and each year is also represented by an element (metal, wood, water, fire, and earth). Lunar New Year is also the most important holiday of the year in Asia. The year we were born it was the water snake year the water snake represents being intelligent, artistic, emotional, creative and social.

Hop on and off bus tours
We went on a hop on and off double decker bus to experience Tết around Ho Chi Minh City. As we got closer to the New Year, we saw that all of the flower markets were nearly sold out and that the decorations and preparations were being finished. At the starting point of the bus line there was a huge walking street with flowers and decorations everywhere! It is the year of the horse so the street was full of horse decorations. We were surprised to see how much work they put into the holiday each year.

Fireworks
At midnight on New Year’s Eve we saw tons of small green and red fireworks exploding everywhere from our balcony. They were lighting up the sky and it was very pretty. Unfortunately we did not get a great view of the bigger firework shows because buildings were in the way but it was still cool. We had chosen to stay in our building and watch the show from here and see what we could see because my dad had read story’s about it taking hours for some people to get a taxi back home.


Following days
The first 2-5 days of the New Year, everything is shut down including many restaurants, grocery stores, local markets, and some tourist attractions. Some big restaurant chains stay open during the holiday like McDonalds, KFC, Pizza 4P’s, Burger King, and Highlands coffee (Vietnams version of Starbucks). They often have reduced hours during the holidays. We had to stock up at the grocery store a few days earlier because we had been eating almost every meal at restaurants.