Christmas (will come back to food next week).
The Vietnamese don’t ‘officially’ do Christmas. Their government has no National religion but in reality it’s a strange mix of Buddhism, Taoism and ancestor worship with ‘Pagodas’ – inhabited my male and female monks – liberally spread through all communities. Their main holiday is ‘Tet’ which is really the Chinese Lunar New Year and falls at the end of January/ early February. There’s usually a two week break from everything and the city empties out as people go back to their original rural homes Family shrines and ancestral burial sites are cleaned, painted and visited.
However!
It’s an irresistible commercial opportunity and so great effort is expended ‘Selling’ Christmas even though ‘Christmas Day’ is a normal working day, kids go to school, people go to work. The Catholic population do celebrate Christmas but for some reason they think that the main day of the Christmas ‘event’ is December 24th- Christmas Eve. From what I gather it’s a legacy of the French Colonial Period.
The Catholic element of Saigon is quite interesting. In the late 40’s early 50’s Ho Chi Minh and his military man General Vo were conducting an offensive (The Vietminh) in the north of the country (Hanoi and the Red River basin area). They were killing/murdering anyone connected to / working for, the French and by default that meant Catholics. The French, assisted by the Americans shipped thousands of Catholic families down south where they settled on scrubbland on the outskirts of the city. That area is now very desirable and is the home to Celadon City a large area containing multiple high rise apartment blocks, Aeon Shopping Mall, five star sports resort new state schools, new International school and soon a new International University. it is the place to be in Saigon. Celadon is an exquisite ancient porcelain stolen from Korea by the Japanese in the 1920’s.
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