One of the reasons why I love Vietnam, is the positive and optimistic vibes which seem to permeate all aspects of daily life. Vietnamese people are joyful, full of hopes for the future of the country, and always up to celebrate for any reason. Besides birthdays and weddings, I have seen many festivals and sometimes unexpected occasions for which I saw them very involved in celebrating somehow: Vietnamese Women’s day, Mid-Autumn Festival, Fool Moon Festival, Reunification Day, Independence Day, Valentine’s Day, Vietnam Under 23 Asian Cup’s semifinal victory…
It’s not only about consumerism, like in Europe, they don’t have such a developed merchandising for all of these special occasions, and don’t necessarily spend money on these festivities. Celebrating can be also just spending time with your beloved ones, going to a pagoda, visiting uncle Ho’s Mausoleum, burning voting offerings on the street, carrying a flag on your motorbike, hanging around all together…it’s just being happier than usual, enjoying whatever goodness you have in life to the fullest, taking every possible chance to notice how life is beautiful.
Vietnamese are hungry for happiness.
But talking about festivities, nothing matters as TET does. TET (yes, you write it in capital letters) is the annual Vietnamese New Year celebration, known as the Lunar New Year, and occurring in January or February, as per the Chinese calendar and traditions.
It was originally celebrated by Vietnamese farmers to thank the gods for the arrival of spring and it is still considered as the first day of the season. TET is family time, millions of people travel throughout the country to gather in their hometowns with friends and family. In the narrow sense, it is typically celebrated for three days, when specific traditions are observed: the first day is usually spent with close family, the second day is reserved for visiting friends, and the third one is dedicated to teachers who play an important role in people’s lives, and to visit temples and pagodas.
TET is definitely the longest public holiday in Vietnam, and it’s the only period of the year when shops, restaurants and businesses are closed. Most of the country sort of shuts down for about a week. All transportation, flights, trains, bus routes, hotels, are fully booked, the major tourist sites are closed and any commercial activity exceptionally running over those days is way overpriced.
But real “fun” for non-Vietnamese residents happens during the 2 weeks right before TET: it’s a kind of collective madness, you are overwhelmed by a frantic, festive atmosphere, everybody rushes to get ready for the big event, purchasing everything that will be needed for the week off: gifts, groceries, decorations, plants, new clothing… Supermarkets are over stocked with every kind of products, that would be enough to stock up for months of starvation, and you have to line up to buy any basic stuff (and you know, Vietnamese are not the neat ones…). Traffic and pollution increase significantly: people burn mounds of stuff and paper at every corner, and these fumes together with the exhaust emissions, make the air utterly unbreathable.
This is the period of the year when my love and hate feeling for this city reaches the peak, it’s freaking unlivable, but extraordinarily lively: I cannot recall of anything similar or remotely comparable. Maybe also because here in Asia quantities of people and things are in the next range, we cannot “compete” with the chaos generated by 10 millions people in a city, even more in a developing country where rules and penalties still need to be implemented, or factually applied.
Also every house needs to be prepared to welcome the new year properly, in order to attract good fortune for the new year. A week before TET, all members of the family clean and fix up the house, repairing broken things and replacing old stuff, gardening and decorating the ancestors altars and the whole apartment.
As we have pine trees for Christmas in the West, they have 2 plants in particular that cannot be missed in any house for Lunar New Year: peach brunches and kumquat trees. Peach blossoms are believed to chase away evil spirits and symbolize hope and vitality, while kumquat trees bring good luck and prosperity.
But coming to my favorite tradition, a very creative and playful merchandising is developed every year, featuring the zodiac sign of the new year coming up. Basically you can find any possible gadget or decoration shaped as the figure, and this year we are particularly lucky with the subject: we are welcoming the Year of the Pig.
See following my on the go-bad quality-pics gallery, put together over the last month: getting distracted really helped me to survive while stuck in traffic choking, or trying to run any errand during those weeks of madness…and I felt the magic, anyways. Hope this can give you a hint of TET, from a healthy distance.
Vietnam overload 