Spokane Vietnamese Community
The Vietnamese Community has been represented in the Spokane area since the early 1990s. Today there are nearly 1000 people of the Vietnamese culture group that live in the Spokane area!
The most popular winter holiday in the Vietnamese culture is the Tet New Year and Autumn Lantern Festival! During Tet, it is common practice to roll Banh Chung and Banh Tet, which are rice cakes that have savory or sweet filling and are wrapped in banana leaves and steamed. Additionally, family dinners are customary, especially during the holidays! The most traditional dishes during the winter holidays include Banh Chung for Tet, and Moon Cakes for the Autumn festival.
It is common for red envelopes and red décor, along with scrolls depicting good luck sayings to be hung throughout the house during Tet. Lanterns are usually hung during the Autumn festival. Card games and dice games call Bau, Cua, Ca, Cop are often played during the new year!
The local Spokane temple cooks food almost weekly to sell, it is all vegetarian, this is to fundraise but also for people to come to the temple and get to know where the Spokane Vietnamese group is and what they do!
The day of Tet New Year, families gather and children receive red envelopes filled with good luck money by various family members. Families then go to the temple and worship and thank the gods for blessing them with another year and ask for blessings for the new year! Additionally, the lion dancers perform to ward away any bad spirits.
In Spokane, the Vietnamese community has a great new years celebration every year, with a lion dance and well as multi day worship at the local temple, this type of celebration is not practiced in Vietnam!
These pictures are from Tet New Year celebrations!
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