Arrived back in Saigon a few days before the official start of Tet but the craziness had already begun. Streets filled with motorbikes, so what’s new; ya, but it seemed even more of them than normal and all in a rush, and again – OK, the same rush but this scene now had most bikes laden down with plants, flowers, cases of beer and all kinds of treats and gifts for the holiday. This getting ready for Tet is big stuff – parks are filled with flowers, trees and all kinds of special stuff for hearth and home. Street vendors increase in density and diversify, lit plastic devil horns where an especially hot item along with colored light gadgets you hold. 
It can be hard for foreigners to appereciate all this effort required to get the holiday going and some may not understand why the Tet New Year is celebrated on a different day every year. Because as we all know the first of January as the start of the New year sp wjar'ts thos all about. Well, strange as it may seem there was civilized life before us, even a different calendar was established by the Chinese. This Chinese calander was pretty complicated and heady stuff, moon phases and all that were used as the bases for keeping track of the passing of time. Hence the lunar Year was created and the celebration of this in Vietnam is called Tet.
I don’t know about the rest of Vietnam but HCM City puts on a super duper show. The most dramtic event is the blocking off Nguyen Hue to motorized traffic and turning it into a giant walk through display of exotic tropical trees and flowers. Among all this living beauty are sculptured traditional characters and objects depicting the characters related to Tet, all this is lit in a fantastic show of show of lights and with traditional music cascading out.
The main street Le Loi, which terminates into Nguyen Hue is draped with lights and interwoven with artistic renditions of flowers creating a breath taking canopy over the entire boulevard. Bright red wrappings wound with more colored lights cover the trees lining the sides of the boulevard, giving a dramatic approach to the main show on Nguyen Hue.
It seems the celebration of Tet lasts about a week and during this many businesses close and so travel is big for Vietnamese during the period. Either heading back to the country side, Mekong, Hanoi, heading out for a holiday or just around town on your motorbike, Vietnam is in motion. While this is an interesting time, filled with tradition, so very interesting to us foreigners but traveling is just about impossible and many places of business are closed, even eating can be a challenge.
The opportunity for a new start is taken pretty serious, houses are cleaned from top to bottom, new clothes are bought and friends and family are visited and treated politely, gifts are given to insure transgression are over looked and things get off to a good start for the New Year.
Which leads us to Lucky money, my thinking is it’s kind of a karma thing coupled with the trickle down theory of economics carried out with in a little red envelope. So here is - a little red envelope with a crisp small denomination dong note inside, it’s passed from elders down or maybe hung with no money inside from a decorative Tet tree in the house where visitors are allowed to pluck one off for good luck. It’s really not about the value of what is inside but the concept of sharing your wealth for a New Year.
For me, after surviving the celebration of two new years, I know 2009, the year of the buffalo, is going to be a good one.
Chuc Mung Nam Moi
