Tet is the Vietnamese New Years celebration. When I was looking for a custom unique to Vietnam for us to do as part of the World Culture Tour, Tet kept coming up. Granted, familiarity with the Tet Offensive as it related to the Vietnam War may have been what made the word stand out, but it did come up repeatedly regardless.
So, how do Vietnamese celebrate Tet? Mostly, they celebrate it just like everywhere else but with a focus on spending time with family. We got together with my brother-in-law and hung out for the day singing karaoke.
Vietnam does, however, have 1 very unique custom related to Tet, a "dragon parade." In a dragon parade, you make a giant dragon craft and then wear it while parading around the house, playing a gong. The belief is that this parade wards off bad luck for the year. So, why not, every little bit helps.
To make the dragon craft, wrap a larger and smaller box both in red wrapping paper. Make sure the larger box is big enough for a kid to fit his/her head and shoulders in.
Attach the two boxes together. We used a combination of glue and paper towel rolls stuck through from box to box to stabilize the connection from the inside.
Add red Solo cups as nostrils.
Next, add a stripe and horns with different color paper. We used blue to really offset from the red. The horns themselves are made from toilet paper rolls.
Add googly eyes.
Then, we added eyebrows and teeth using orange and white pompoms, respectively.
For the final piece of the face, we threw in white pipe cleaners for the dragon's mustache.
Next, you need to add something on the top of his head. I've seen cardboard cutouts forming a scaly mane. Instead, though, we picked up 2 flashy cheerleader pom poms (different than the little craft "pompoms") from the dollar store and impaled them into the top of the dragon's head. This gave a look of bright, glittery hair.
Finally, you have to create the body and the tail, and it has to be big enough to let 1-3 kids in it for the parade. For this, we used table cloths from the dollar store. We stapled 2 red ones together for the body and cut a yellow one long-ways to add to the seam of the 2 red ones with the second half sticking out even longer as the tail.
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