Vietnam Week: Celebrating Tet

Tet in Vietnam for slowing down and remembering what’s good about life – family, friends and food.

Going home for Tet is a once-a-year recharge, a time for celebrating, reconnecting, feasting and napping.

We arrived in Ho Chi Minh City a few days before the new year, in time to catch a glimpse of the Tet buildup, the riot of colours on the streets and the madness of the last-minute Tet shopping. Our celebrations included a fantastic home-cooked New Year’s Eve family dinner, a New Year’s Day trip to the pagoda for photographs and lunch and a long lazy afternoon of napping, drinking tea, snacking on mứt, receiving visitors and watching dragons dance.

This was how it looked….

A roadside stall selling Tet flowers

A last-minute Tet delivery

Our home-cooked Tet Eve feast

Traditional Tet family photo at the pagoda

Tet greetings on a lime tree at the pagoda

Feted by a Buddhist nun at the pagoda

A vegetarian version of the Tet dish Banh Tet, made of sticky rice and mung bean paste

The traditional Tet snack called mứt, a selection of dried and candied fruit, seeds and candy. My favourite is the mứt dừa, candied coconut flesh, the curly strips in the foreground of this picture

Troupes of dragon dancers patrol the streets during Tet, stopping from time to time to dispute ownership of a watermelon

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By: Barbara

A career girl who dropped out, traveled, found love, and never got around to going home again. Now wrangling a cross-cultural relationship and two third culture kids.