Traditional Lunar New Year alive in Hanoi
People will gather together to prepare for Tet Holiday 2016 and share feelings when New Year comes to the holy space of So Village's Communal House in Quoc Oai, a suburban district of Hanoi.
An atmosphere of traditional Lunar New Year will be enjoyed with various activities such as presenting offerings for gods and ancestors, wrapping banh chung (square glutinous rice cake), hat cua dinh (ceremonial singing), an exhibition about folk paintings and calligraphy.
Dinh Lang Viet (Vietnamese communal houses) group will organise the event at So Village's Communal House this weekend.
Wrapping banh chung is among traditional activities to prepare for Tet. However, in recent years, people often buy ready-to-eat cakes instead of making them themselves.
"Participants will make the cakes together, which will remind them of traditional Tet in the old days," said art critic Nguyen Duc Binh, founder of the Dinh Lang Viet group.
"We try to reenact all the moments of Tet celebration in which people can live slow and enjoy the sacred and special things of the new year," he said.
Old people in the village and folk cultural experts will talk about rituals and customs of Vietnamese people such as decorating houses with paintings, offering incense at temples, setting up cay neu (New Year trees to drive evil away) and visiting relatives during Tet holiday.
The Dinh Lang Viet group was established in 2014 and has attracted numerous folk culture researchers, photographers, architects, painters, sculptors and journalists who share a love for Vietnamese communal houses and the intangible value of their cultural space.
They try to warn people of the changing conditions of tangible and intangible cultural values in traditional Vietnamese communal houses, growing damage, the modification of traditional values and the possibility of the disappearance of communal houses across the country.
So Village's Communal House is 40km to the west of Hanoi's centre. The event, with organized activities, promises to bring participants a memorable experience of Vietnamese traditional Tet.
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