HANOI, VIETNAM – Our Christmas and New Year’s celebrations were certainly a bit different this year. We don’t usually do much, sometimes go to a movie, usually fix ourselves a nice dinner, but we’re not big gift-givers.
We both hate that in the U.S. the “Christmas season” seems to start even before summer ends.
In early August, just as the sun begins to set a little earlier each day and thoughts turn to kids going back to school, the stores are already putting out Christmas decorations, cards, wrapping paper and ribbons.
Heading into September, the Christmas goods actively compete for shelf space with mountains of Halloween costumes, candy and other spooky paraphernalia, with Thanksgiving-themed detritus thrown in for good measure.
When we arrived in Hanoi in mid-November, Melanie and I were happy that here in Southeast Asia, Christmas is not the marketing assault it seems to be back in the States, maybe because a large portion of the population here is Buddhist.
As we walked around the city, we saw few holiday decorations, except for a couple of blocks in Hanoi’s Old Quarter that we dubbed “Christmas Street.” In Old Town many individual streets have traditionally been home to specific types of shop stalls – silks, shoes, kitchen wares, ceramics, etc.
On “Christmas Street” every stall was filled with all manner of holiday décor – ornaments and lights, wrappings, garlands, Santa hats and suits for all ages and genders (including the family pets), and every other type of tacky Christmas stuff you see for sale everywhere back home. It’s a brilliant spectacle of red, gold and glittering extravagance…
But it was limited to just that one section of the market. Elsewhere around town Christmas decorations and marketing seemed to be almost an afterthought.
There are exceptions, of course. Most of the larger international retail chain stores that cater to expats, tourists and wealthy Hanoians had installed large colorful Christmas displays by the end of November. But many of the small local shops and businesses were still putting up a few colored lights or small window displays in mid-December, just a week or so before the actual holiday.
As for our Christmas celebrations, we Skyped with both of John’s kids and our grand-daughter early on Christmas Eve and gave them a virtual tour of our apartment. And in the evening, we went to a party at the hotel where we had stayed for 9 days when we first arrived in Hanoi.
A couple days later, on the other side of our nearby lake, we noticed that city crews were still installing potted poinsettias and lighted ornaments on the light posts along the boulevard. Huh? Didn’t anyone know Christmas just came and went?
We chalked it up to the fact that the holiday season wouldn’t really be over until New Year’s Day, on January 1st.
Little did we know…
It turns out the Christmas and “Western” New Year’s celebrations were just a warmup (and lukewarm at that) for the main event.
The REAL celebration here is all about Tet, the Lunar New Year, which this year (the year of the Dog) falls on February 16.
Tet is a season for thanksgiving with family, food and flowers. It’s a time for honoring ancestors with prayers and offerings at the temple. It’s a time for new beginnings; out with the old and in with the new.
It took a while for the season to build up, but we could see it unfolding daily before our eyes. Old Town’s “Christmas Street” evolved into “Tet Street” with New Year’s ornaments and décor, and children’s gift items galore.
Traditional Tet foods began to show up for sale in our local wet market, and colorful New Year’s banners were hung on shops and buildings and erected across several major roadways.
The city is lovely now. There are beautiful flowers and flower decorations everywhere. Out of nowhere it seems have come sellers hawking colorful flower bouquets, blocking the sidewalks, blocking traffic in the streets, really everywhere.
In the North, here in Hanoi, they celebrate with plum blossom branches and kumquat trees. You must have them, and if you can afford it, the bigger the better. I’m not kidding.
The trees are transported mostly on motorbikes, tied on the back, sometimes on the sides and even in front of the driver, tucked between his legs. You can see them coming down the boulevard, the top of the tree swaying in the breeze. Many of the trees have been trimmed to a tidy conical Christmas tree shape, and they all have lovely natural orange fruit, already grown in place, for ornaments.
We’ve decided that Tet celebrations in Vietnam are a lot like Christmas back in the States – maybe even more so.
Out of town shop buyers began pouring into Hanoi to purchase goods for their stores early in the season, before the prices began to jump up. And I will tell you it was pretty crazy in the market and the street stalls of Hanoi’s Old Quarter. The aisles and alleyways were jammed, crammed and pretty hilarious at times as we watched people lashing gigantic bundles of merchandise to the backs of puny motorbikes (We’ll do an entire story on motorbikes and their role as delivery vehicles soon).
The shopping fervor only grew as the days went by.
Four days before the holiday, on February 12th, we went to the local “supermarket,” which between its two floors has about as much shelf space as a typical Walgreens store. The buying frenzy was on! There were shoppers all over the store, with no shopping baskets to be had. The aisles are barely 3 feet wide anyway and there was merchandise piled everywhere on the floors making it now about a foot or less.
There was a stack of fine tin-boxed chocolates, 4 feet-high, 6-feet wide and 4-feet deep, completely in the way of any checkout. People were buying tons of it. Apparently, shoppers came in pairs and would fill four or five baskets between them and keep coming up to the checkout – where the lead person was checking out – and keep adding more stuff.
You could not even negotiate the store safely, and hardly get to the checkout counters. I’m surprised there wasn’t a fight over some product. Seriously, it was humorous. Oh yes, never get between a Vietnamese woman and her shopping!
So our original elation at missing all of the holiday madness back in the States turned out to not be exactly what we expected.
But we were certainly happy to skip all that cold, wet white stuff this year.