New Year’s Eve incense. Photo: Le Van Thuy
We often say: save for a year, spend in three days of New Year. This is not an overstatement, because spending for New Year is not a luxury for people, but a necessity, moreover, a reluctance.
Many people do not want to spend for New Year, especially those who do not have money, but it’s not right if someone doesn’t spend. To tell the truth, if someone doesn’t spend for New Year, it doesn’t matter, but a funeral still needs a table, eating and drinking, a new bride still has to step over a fire, a ninth-rate of literature still has to be celebrate, so New Year must have something to be New Year. If you have nothing for New Year, people may laugh at you.
Such a meaning is enough to make people sell their property to celebrate New Year. They can also sell their wives and their children, if they don’t think that selling their wives and children, then they celebrate New Year alone.
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On the 23rd day of the twelveth month [lunar calendar], it is customary for Kitchen gods going to Heaven, just like our people see a mandarin off to another place.
In that day, people had to buy three paper hats, a carp, and certainly joss paper.
Tonkin has 6 million people, about a million such houses need to use three million hats. Any hat will do, ladies are not as picky as we are when it comes to Mossant, Wing’s or B. Fléchet hats.
As for carp for use as horses, although many women also know that carp can only be used to fry and eat, they also use up to 500,000 fish. Five hundred thousand carp that day, from the water to the land, then from the land to the water again, but less when coming down than when going up.
A house used during New Year, at least 1,000 of joss paper. If the joss paper was stacked on a square meter, the tree of it would be 8,000 meters tall, which is approximately equal to Mount Everest, the highest in the world.
That’s not to mention a million pairs of shoes, twenty million of incense. If we put those incense together, we will have a stick that go 300,000 kilometers, that is, the path of light in one second.
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Now we talk about spending on the holidays of New Year.
New Year, most importantly, are firecrackers, bánh chưng to eat, tea to drink (Vietnamese tea and Chinese tea) and many other things, such as jams, wine, flowers, etc.
Now, for each house burning during the New Year, two firecrackers, 30 centimetres. A million houses burned 60 million meters of firecrackers or 6,000 kilometers of firecrackers, half the diameter of the earth we live in.
Each meter of firecracker must burn for one minute to burn out. Burning 60,000 meters of them, it takes 60,000 minutes, or 1,000 hours. That is, if we put together those firecrackers and burn them, the firecracker will explode in two months and five days before the sound stops.
Six million people, at least consume 6 million bánh chưng on New Year holidays. If we use bánh chưng as a brick, we will pave a 450-meter-wide courtyard, which means we can pave the old Hanoi citadel.
And if one coin of Chinese tea can make three delicious cups of tea, the amount of Chinese tea consumed during New Year can be used to brew the whole of the Pacific.
And wine, liqueur to drink on New Year’s days, pouring into about two million bottles. With those bottles of wine, it can rain all the time in Hanoi city for four days and nights, the amount of rain is calculated according to a normal rain in a year.
Such approximate numbers are enough to make us understand how much the Annam people spend on New Year’s Days (only in Tonkin).
During the New Year’s Days, people eat, drink, and play like months on normal days. But the player is not bored yet, and eating is not satisfied, not gloating, it’s enough to know how hungry people are.
But there are a lot of people who are really hungry.
Article by author Việt-Sinh (a pseudonym of Thế Lữ) published on Ngày Nay newspaper, February 10, 1935.
