Often, when New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day Celebrations are mentioned, many Americans tend to imagine fireworks and champagne among other vibrant festivities occurring on December 31st and January 1st. However, while Vietnamese-American families celebrate this holiday, they also celebrate their own unique holiday based on the lunar calendar. Due to my relationship with Gabrielle Nguyen, I have been able to experience the New Orleans Vietnamese community’s rendition of some of the events of Vietnamese New Year’s, or Tết, firsthand. Centuries ago when the Vietnamese culture became independent from the Chinese, they took with them some of the Chinese traditions. Celebrating the lunar New Year is one of the important traditions taken from
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All of the food, save for a few Cajun foods like crawfish, oysters, and gumbo, are traditional Vietnamese foods. I believe that the extensive food selection and quantity helps many Vietnamese in the community to establish and maintain their connection to their own culture. Gabrielle, agrees, saying that many of today’s Vietnamese-American children do not know how to speak anything but English; furthermore, she presses that many families have stopped some of the traditional celebrations, especially at …show more content…
Just before Tết, Gabrielle says that the whole house must be cleaned, from the first floor of her two story house to the roof. Everyone must participate every year in sweeping, vacuuming, and generally cleaning the house for the new year that is coming. Gabrielle believes that the tradition started in Vietnam, as the superstitious practice of sweeping and cleaning out the bad luck and spirits from a home in preparation for the new year. Additionally, she says that they clean the house before Tết because it is traditionally bad luck to clean on the first day of the new year because one will sweep out all of the luck for the year. The reason this tradition has stayed so constant is because Gabrielle’s grandparents, both maternal and paternal were born and raised in Vietnam, only moving to the United States during the Vietnam War. Because of their roots, they taught their children, Gabrielle’s parents, aunts and uncles, the house cleaning tradition. However, Gabrielle states that as the older generation Vietnamese are dying, the younger generations of Vietnamese-Americans are often not continuing these type of superstitious traditional practices because they are seen as unnecessary and
All of the food, save for a few Cajun foods like crawfish, oysters, and gumbo, are traditional Vietnamese foods. I believe that the extensive food selection and quantity helps many Vietnamese in the community to establish and maintain their connection to their own culture. Gabrielle, agrees, saying that many of today’s Vietnamese-American children do not know how to speak anything but English; furthermore, she presses that many families have stopped some of the traditional celebrations, especially at …show more content…
Just before Tết, Gabrielle says that the whole house must be cleaned, from the first floor of her two story house to the roof. Everyone must participate every year in sweeping, vacuuming, and generally cleaning the house for the new year that is coming. Gabrielle believes that the tradition started in Vietnam, as the superstitious practice of sweeping and cleaning out the bad luck and spirits from a home in preparation for the new year. Additionally, she says that they clean the house before Tết because it is traditionally bad luck to clean on the first day of the new year because one will sweep out all of the luck for the year. The reason this tradition has stayed so constant is because Gabrielle’s grandparents, both maternal and paternal were born and raised in Vietnam, only moving to the United States during the Vietnam War. Because of their roots, they taught their children, Gabrielle’s parents, aunts and uncles, the house cleaning tradition. However, Gabrielle states that as the older generation Vietnamese are dying, the younger generations of Vietnamese-Americans are often not continuing these type of superstitious traditional practices because they are seen as unnecessary and