Vietnam New Year

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Tet is the celebration of the Vietnamese New Year. New Years Day is the first January of the lunar calendar. Vietnamese and Chinese lunar calendar are not exactly the same. Also, the twelve animals they use are quite different from those used by the Chinese. For example, Vietnamese has the year of the cat, but no year of the rabbit. People always do a lot of things to prepare for the New Year. People clean and re-decorate their houses beautifully. They buy new clothes for the New Year. The people often prepare special foods like Banh Chung and Banh Day. Banh Chung is a square rice cake, stuffed with cooked bean paste and ground meat in the middle to symbolize the Earth that the Vietnamese walk on. Banh Day is rice molded into round cakes, symbolizing the sky. On the twenty-third of the last month in the year, people have a small ceremony to "say goodbye" to the Kitchen's Gods. The Kitchen's Gods are made of a woman and her two husbands. The Kitchen’s Gods are meant to be seen as the symbol of family. On the last day of the year, at lunch time, people have a ceremony to "say goodbye" to the ancestors. In every Vietnamese family, people worship their ancestors just like how they worship the Buddha. They say goodbye to the ancestors, so they will go to heaven to have the New Year party with the God of Heaven. They will come back after the party to stay with their defectors and help them out. On New Year’s Eve, the people have their ceremony to welcome the New Year. After that moment, it is important that the first person visit their home must be the right person for their family, not a family friend. If not, their family is said to have bad luck for the rest of the year. Family members would then usually say Happy new year to each other, eat special food from the ceremonies, and go to the temples for good luck if they go straight home. On the first day,
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