Tet Holiday Essay

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Vietnamese Traditional Holiday There are 195 countries in the world. Each country has a different culture and traditional holidays. Have you ever been curious about how people celebrate their traditional holidays? Tết is a traditional holiday of Vietnamese people. Tet holiday is also known as Lunar New Year and is held for three days from the first day of the first month of the lunar calendar. There are three elements that make Tet an exciting holiday are the food, the activities, and family reunions. First of all, one of the most indispensable parts that creates a meaningful Tet is food. Tet is an occasion to renew houses to welcome an upcoming new year. One or two weeks before Tet, the streets are full of people. They are in a bustle of going to the market with a long list of necessary new things and food that they need to buy. All people try to choose the freshest meat and fruit for the traditional dishes. The most popular dishes are bánh chưng, bánh dầy and bánh tét (Chung cake, Day cake and Tet cake.) They have the same recipe as sticky rice, mung bean and pork meat; the only difference of them is the shape. While the shape of bánh chưng is a square that represents the ground, and a circular bánh dầy is the universe, bánh tét is a cylindrical shape that symbolizes reproductive power. The preparation for these foods has a lot of painstaking steps. Vietnamese people often use lá dong (Dong leaf) to wrap these ingredients. However, they also use lá chuối (Banana leaf). The mung bean and sticky rice have to soak for a day. People have to wash and dry the leaves. After that, they spread out the leaves as the shape of the cake they want to make. They put a layer of sticky rice on the leaves, then mung bean and meat. Repeatly, they put the mung bean and sticky rice at last. The last step is to wrap the leaves to cover the whole cake and tie it with a rope

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