(PICTURE: A vendor selling the Tet trees in a park.)Tet Holiday, the Chinese New Year, starts in Vietnam this weekend. As a casual observer, you would have thought the holiday started weeks ago because the traffic and overall level of madness has doubled around the city.
One sign that Tet is approaching is that the streets are lined with small orange tree/bush things. Although the fruit looks like oranges they're actually more in the lime family. Every family basically buys one of these trees and puts it in their house. Yeah, it's basically the Vietnamese equivalent of the Christmas Tree. Or perhaps the Christmas tree is the Christian equivalent of the Vietnamese/Chinese new year tree since I'm pretty sure China was celebrating New Years way before Jesus was born.
Last night as I was tutoring my next door neighbor, I commented that his orange-tree thingermerbob was quite nice. He told me that he and his father drove 10K to a farm to get their tree. He told me many people have the same tree every year and they keep it on a farm for basically 51 weeks out of the year and just pick it up for Tet. It's kind of like a distant relative you only see on Thanksgiving.
5 comments:
It looks delicious. Do they eat the fruit or use it for cooking? Can you tell your audience what Tet is all about...
Mom,
According to my assistant Wikipedia: "Tết Nguyên Đán Tet Nguyen Dan, more commonly known by its shortened name Tết, is the most important and popular holiday and festival in Vietnam. It is the Vietnamese New Year which is based on the Lunar calendar, a lunisolar calendar. The name Tết Nguyên Đán is Sino-Vietnamese for Feast of the First Morning, derived from the Hán nôm characters 節元旦.
Tết is celebrated on the same day as Chinese New Year though exceptions arise due to the one-hour time difference between Hanoi and Beijing. It takes place from the first day of the first month of the Chinese calendar (around late January or early February) until at least the third day. Tết shares many of the same customs of its Chinese counterpart. Many Vietnamese prepare for Tết by cooking special holiday foods and cleaning the house. There are a lot of customs practiced during Tết, like visiting a person's house on the first day of the new year (xông nhà), ancestral worshipping, wishing New Year's greetings, giving lucky money to children and old people and opening a shop.
Tết is also an occasion for pilgrims and family reunions. During Tết, Vietnamese visit their relatives and temples, forgetting about the troubles of the past year and hoping for a better upcoming year. They consider Tết to be the first day of spring and the festival is often called Hội xuân (spring festival).
thanks for the education
Ben, I believe the orange things are cumquats. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumquat)
I think the more fruit a bush has the more fortune or luck one is supposed to have. I also think it is good to give a bush with lots of fruit as a gift.
Robin, Huyen says you are "exactly right." Thanks for letting me know!
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