Christmas In Vietnam - Saigon, Invaded Again!

Well, shit. I'm late again. The Vietnamese started putting up the Holiday decorations weeks ago. Never mind that there won't be any snow or that we won't even feel a smidgen's worth of cold. They've broken out the fiberglass reindeer and beat the pants off American retailers at getting this season off to an ice-sicley start. Remember, there's no such thing as Thanksgiving in a tropical climate because harvest season basically lasts all year, so there's no real start point for what will end up being a two month holiday. What happens essentially, is that somewhere in late November the decorations start going up and they'll stay up throughout the Lunar New Year, known as Tet in Vietnam, with minor changes and Santas replaced by Buddhas once Christmas is over. And there's little distinction between the Western New Year and the Lunar one. To the Viets, it's just an excuse to party and drive their kids around in Holiday garb on their motorbikes for months.

To aid in introducing this auspicious event, I've recruited my alter-ego, CitizenMekong, to MC the festivities for you this year. The video below gives you a pretty good capsule synopsis of what goes on around here - and don't complain about the picture or sound quality either. You must understand that CitizenMekong is a capitalist reporter working undercover in a Communist country and so must execute his reports via "spy-cam", an ultra-secret device hidden in an ordinary Motorola cel-phone. Pretty damn amazing, and a tribute to technology if you ask me.





Probably, now, having viewed the video, you'll have noticed that that there was virtually no mention of the birth of Jesus or much of a Christian theme to anything - and that's simply because, in Vietnam, Christmas has nothing to do with any sort of "Christ" or "Christ-child" or any of that secular rubbish. Here, it's been boiled down to strictly the commercial free-for-all the retail community has always wanted it to be - and it fits seamlessly into the coming Lunar New Year celebrations, if only by virtue of costume changes and a distinct slow-down in all sorts of work, government and school practices for the duration of a roughly two month season. By the time the Viets wake up from this Joyeux Noël cum Tet/Lunar hangover, all us bored foreigners will so chirping looney to get back to work that they'll be able to get us on the cheap through the beginning of March!

It Was 40 Years Ago Today...

Well, not 40 years ago exactly, but 40 years ago in general that the Vietnamese launched the Tet offensive on American forces in the war. It was a surprise attack, launching on the first of the Vietnamese Holiday of Tet, or Lunar New Year, the same as the Chinese and Koreans celebrate. While historians have generally considered the Tet offensive to have been politically successful, militarily it cost great lost of life to the Viet Cong and inflicted heavy casualties on soldiers and villagers alike.

Excerpt from Wikipedia:

The Tet Offensive (Tet Mau Than), or officially, Tổng Công Kích/Tổng Khởi Nghĩa - General Offensive, General Uprising, was a three-phase military campaign conducted between National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF or Viet Cong) and the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) during the Vietnam War (1955-1975).The purpose of the operations, which were unprecedented in their magnitude and ferocity, was to strike military and civilian command and control centers throughout the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) and to spark a general uprising among the population that would then topple the Saigon government, thus ending the war in a single blow.

^{I'm sure there were military parades in Hanoi but I didn't see any in Saigon. Tet here passed peacefully, as well it should. During Tet the majority of businesses close for various times over a two-week period but most certainly for the three-day official Holiday which happened last weekend. Almost at the beginning of the Holiday, the man or maybe woman across the street died. So at 4am one day the brass band started up and we were off for three days of burial celebrations. This person ran the busiest Vietnamese restaurant on the street, packed at 4am with all the local workers from the tourist bars here, but during the funeral – closed. And closed still. I wonder if that's the end of the business? Just to give you and idea, here's another Vietnamese funeral – shot from my balcony:}




The modern funeral ceremony, at least in Saigon it seems, borrows a lot from a New Orleans style service. In any case, the Holiday is now finished and the Vietnamese will get back to work, at least until Christmas, when a full two months of festival activities launches again and doesn't end until Valentines Day. Now that's something you get here: all the charming traditional holidays right along with all the cheesy commercial western ones!