This year, we have been excited to celebrate Tet for the first time as a family! Even though our little boy isn’t home yet, we love the Vietnamese culture and are trying to embrace it as much as we can! I’m really excited to celebrate his culture and it will be a great way to keep my mind off of waiting for our LoA. I am by no means an expert on Tet and have been learning everything I can from the internet, so if you celebrate Tet and have any corrections or great tips or ideas, please let me know!
For those who aren’t familiar with Tet, it the Lunar New Year celebration in Vietnam. Similar to Chinese New Year, it is spent celebrating the New Year and spending time with friends and family. Traditionally, it is broken up into 12 days, each with an activity or focus, and in total it’s like combining Christmas, New Years, and the 4th of July. Since we didn’t grow up with these traditions, we’re doing our best to add Tet into our family holidays and adapting them to what works for us. You can find lots of great articles on how these daily traditions came to be (like here) but in this post I’ll just focus on fun ways to celebrate them! Here’s how we’ll be celebrating this year, I’ll add pictures as we go along!:
Day 1 (January 28, 2019): Cleaning the Kitchen!- Day 1 is focused on getting all the old dirt and dust out of the house, especially the Kitchen and releasing goldfish. In Vietnam they spend the day cleaning the kitchen, polishing every utensil and piece of serve ware to get rid of any bad luck and by letting goldfish go in open bodies of water.
We celebrated by doing all the dishes and then going to the pet store and buying goldfish. The boys were so excited to pick them out! We didn’t have the heart to let them go (It’s really cold here right now, plus we get attached quickly haha), so now we have three new pets, which my kids named Spot, Orange, and White (they’ve very creative haha).
Other fun things you could do to celebrate this day would be to color pictures of goldfish, buy goldfish bath toys and have your kiddos take a bath with them, deep clean your kitchen as a family, or buy Swedish Fish and make a cute Carp-looking dessert!
Day 2 and 3 (January 29-30, 2019): Sweeping Out the Old Year!- This is when you really want to get your house clean. Sweep away all the old dust and dirt so no bad luck sticks to it. Everything gets scrubbed and cleaned! Once it’s clean, you don’t want to sweet out any of the new dust, so after all your cleaning, enjoy a break! Tet is a great excuse to get your family involved in cleaning the house!
We picked specific areas of our house to deep clean. I focused on finishing re-organizing and cleaning our hall closet and the kids took over some of the chores that I normally do, even if they get silly and don’t finish, at least they try!
Day 4 (January 31, 2019): Getting a New Year’s Tree!- You know how much I love getting a Christmas Tree, and now we get a fun excuse to get another one! The difference is, with Tet, you are going shopping for a fruit tree! Make sure you’re not just chopping it down though, this is a tree that you want to grow and let flourish!
We have a garden in our backyard with blueberry bushes, so we plan to go to the nursery and buy another blueberry bush to add to our mini-orchard. Traditionally, families buy fruit blossom and kumquat trees, but we aren’t lucky enough to live in as warm of a climate as Vietnam, so we’ll work with what we have. Our blueberry bush will stay in the house until we can plant it outside after the last frost in April. For families who don’t want to buy a tree or can’t, you could still have fun incorporating this day by making origami (Yes, I know that’s not Vietnamese) trees or flowers, or by making a pyramid of Kumquats and eating them!
Day 5 (February 1, 2019): Making Banana Rice Cakes (Gói Bánh Chưng) – Okay, that’s not the official English translation, but on this day, they make an amazing rice dish that is wrapped in Banana leaves. They get boiled for 24 hours so the rice absorbs the flavor of the Banana leaves and given as New Year’s gifts to family and friends. This is the recipe that I will be attempting this year. I like that it utilizes a crock pot during the simmering stage. I’ve never made this before, so wish me luck!
Day 6-7 (February 2-3, 2019): Shopping!– These are days that I don’t think I”ll have any problem with. Most of the stores and markets are closed once it’s officially the Lunar New Year (Tet), so on Day 6, everyone prepares for the stores to close for the next few days. They also go clothes shopping for outfits as a New Year dictates new clothes, especially for children (these will be given as a gift on a later day). We probably won’t buy whole outfits for our kids, but will buy them each one item they need like a shirt or swimsuit (we could always use more swimsuits haha).
Day 8 (February 4, 2019): Fireworks, Family Time, and Herbal Baths!- Day 8 is Lunar New Years Eve and the first big day of celebrating. Families spend this day with their immediate family and enjoy firework shows. We’ll probably keep things low key and just do sparklers on the back porch but the firework shows they do in Vietnam are a big deal, like our 4th of July. They also purify themselves by taking Herbal baths to bring the New Year in on the right note.
I’ll take day 8 as a great day for having a big family dinner and then take a nice bath that night. I never complain about having an excuse to relax in the bath!
Day 9 (February 5th, 2019): New Year’s Day!- In Vietnam, the first person to walk through your door is thought to set the tone for how that families year will go, so people seek out someone lucky, with good fortune, fertile, etc to be the first one to walk into their house on New Years Day. We aren’t sure who we’ll invite over but we’ll make it someone great haha. Families give children red envelopes with money to spend on their education and treats. People wear their brand new outfits they bought on days 6-7 and enjoy feasting with immediate family!
Day 10 (February 6th, 2019): The Second Day of Tet- The first day of Tet is meant for the family living in the home, and the second day is for spending with extended family. Families get together to have feast and honor ancestors and give money to children.
We’re thinking about trying to get together with our extended family and share this holiday with them! If you don’t have extended family nearby, this would be a great day to take the time to skype them or write snail mail to them! I love letters and I know everyone likes getting mail. If your children are little, they could color a Tet or Vietnam inspired picture to send to family, and older children could write letters to Grandparents or cousins. It could be the start of new tradition!
Day 11 (February 7th, 2019): The Third Day of Tet- Day 3 is for spending time with family, friends and teachers. I love that they have a day dedicated to focusing on your friends and teachers. It’s easy to get busy and forget to focus on those people during the holidays too. This is a whole day set apart for reconnecting and honoring those people and eating more!
I’ve been thinking a lot about how we’ll celebrate day 11, I think I might write a note to a few of my old teachers to let them know how much I appreciated them, and have Sawyer make a card for his teacher. We definitely will get together with friends and let the kids play!
Day 12 (February 8th, 2019): The Last Day of Tet and Biggest Meal!- The final day of Tet calls for the biggest celebration to send Tet off with a bang. Families have a huge feast that last hours and the parties tend to spill out onto the streets. Families burn paper money for the ancestors and feast on the food they’ve been making together over the last 12 days.
Our versions of going all out with our Vietnamese feast is going to be heading to the local Vietnamese restaurant! I have tried my hand at a few Vietnamese recipes, but we thought it’d be fun to treat our family to more authentic Vietnamese and go out! We have to great Vietnamese restaurants near us, and we’re excited to try new dishes and have an excuse to visit one of them. If we burn money, it will definitely be monopoly money haha.
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