Happy Lunar New Year! It's one of the most important festivals in many Asian countries. The holiday prompts what is considered one of the world's largest annual human migrations as hundreds of millions of people travel back to their hometowns to spend the festivities, which last up to two weeks, with their families. Celebrants gather to see parades and perform various rites and rituals with elders in order to guarantee a lucky year ahead.
Here in the U.S., I've only celebrated each Lunar New Year — or Tet, in Vietnamese — for one day each year, as it's not a federally recognized holiday. Nevertheless, my parents made sure we spent our time wisely.
The whole family would take the day off and wear our traditional ao dai to visit my grandparents. We would receive red envelopes, called li xi, filled with "lucky" money, but only after giving well wishes to our elders. Leading up to the new year, we would clean the house up and down and spend days making banh chung, a sticky rice cake filled with pork belly and mung bean.
It wasn't until my first Lunar New Year alone in college that I came to appreciate the how grounding it can be to spend the first day of the year focused on joy and family. While Lunar New Year has been celebrated or centuries in Asia, for members of the diaspora, festivities have evolved as people invite loved ones from other cultures to join in. Here's how some of us at NPR celebrate.
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