Time to celebrate Chinese New Year and usher in the Year of the Horse…
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Also known as the Spring Festival, this holiday begins on the last day of the lunar year (Jan. 31), and has much of Southeast Asia donning red and gold decorations.
For those with Chinese ancestry, the Lunar New Year is the most important traditional holiday. A time to h0nour the gods and ancestors, families make offering and pray for the future.
Home and family are the principal focuses. In preparation for the holiday, homes are thoroughly cleaned to rid them of “huiqi,” or inauspicious breaths, which might have collected during the old year. Cleaning is also meant to appease the gods who would be coming down from heaven to make inspections. Ritual sacrifices of food and paper icons are offered to gods and ancestors and people post scrolls printed with lucky messages on household gates and set off firecrackers to frighten evil spirits. Many of the rites carried out during this period were meant to bring good luck to the household and long life to the family–particularly to the parents.
Most important, and the best part of any holiday, is the feasting. On New Year’s Eve, the extended family joins around the table for a meal that is too big to finish.
In Vietnam, the new year is marks the beginning of Tet, the country’s biggest celebration. Tet is also an occasion for pilgrims and family reunions. During Tet, Vietnamese visit their relatives and temples, forgetting about the troubles of the past year and hoping for a better upcoming year.
In much of Vietnam, businesses and tourists sites will be closed as people travel home to visit with their families. Tet can be a great time to see Vietnam at its most colorful, especially in the cities of Hue, Hanoi, and Saigon as long as you don’t mind the delays that the country’s biggest holiday brings.
We would like to wish all a Happy New Year and may the Year of the Horse bring you luck and prosperity.