There are significant holidays to every country. Holiday is define as a day free from work that one may spend time to relax, especially a day on which custom or the law dictates a stopping of general business activity to honor or celebrate a particular event. In religious term, it is a holy day. For example, American people celebrate holidays such as, Thanksgiving and Christmas, Hispanics celebrate Cinco de Mayo, and for Vietnamese people, we celebrate a very important holiday which is the Vietnamese New Year.
In my speech today, I will inform all of you how the Vietnamese New Year came into being, the tradition rituals, and how we celebrate the New Year.
Vietnam is a country in the Eastern Hemisphere that was influenced by China for over decades. Therefore, the Chinese New Year and the Vietnamese New Year, which we call Tet, have many similarities. It was told that thousand of years ago in a small village of China, there was a monster who came one winter's eve and destroyed the village.
U.S. Marines move through the ruins of the hamlet ...
Civilians sort through the ruins of their homes in...
Tet Festival in Little Saigon, Orange County, Cali...The following year, the monster returned and again destroyed the village. Before it could happened a third time, the villagers worked out a plan to scare the monster away. Throughout the whole village, red banners were hung; the color red had long been believed to protect against evil. Firecrackers, drums and gongs were used to celebrate loud noises to scare the monster away. The plan worked and the celebration lasted several days during which people visited with each other, exchanged gifts, danced, and ate tasty food. That was how the New Year got started.
The New Year begins on the first night of the first moon. This is sometime between January 21 and February 19 on the solar calendar. The day of the New...