Vietnamese families have Christmas trees in their living rooms - but those trees are peach or kumquat trees in the north and apricots or tangerines in South Vietnam. Orange and red are the colors of the Vietnamese New Year. The streets are empty at Têt. Everyone is with their families; nobody is at work or in the streets. As European people go to church at Christmas, the Vietnamese visit the city's temples and pagodas to pray for happiness and felicity. The Vietnamese buy their groceries in advance, because on Têt everything is more expensive due to Têt-surcharges.

Food is very important on Têt as it is on Christmas. "New" Year is taken literally in Vietnam. Everything is new: The clothes, the hairstyle, the home. Têt is also a great clean-up and cleaning hard. Not only are the rooms cleaned, but also is the ancestral altar. The belief that the ancestors watch over the family, is the main religion of the Vietnamese. Countless traditions have grown up around the New Year: The final wash of the year, the first visitor of the year, everything is transformed in symbolically charged events. Also cleaning in the first days of the New Year is a taboo: The happiness could be swept out. The date of the New Year is based on a lunisolar calendar, which is based on the lunar month, but it fits with the aid of an intercalary month at the Western calendar. This is why New Year's Day bounces back and forth between January and February.