Like Spring Festival in China, traditional New Year is also the most important festival in Vietnam. Known as Tet Nguyen Dan, or Tet for short, the festival is based on the Vietnamese calendar, which largely derives from the lunisolar Chinese calendar and usually falls in January or February.

Similar to Spring Festival, Tet is the time for family reunions. People cook special holiday food and do house cleaning beforehand, and exchange New Year's greetings and give lucky money to children during the festival, just as Chinese people do at Spring Festival.

But there are also some differences. During Tet, Vietnamese people often decorate their houses with yellow apricot blossoms, peach blossoms or other flowers, depending on what part of the country they live in. Traditionally, each family also displays an artificial New Year tree known as cay neu, a 5-meter-long bamboo pole decorated with objects on the top, including good luck charms and origami fish.

Unlike people in many places across China who eat dumplings during Spring Festival, Vietnamese people enjoy their own food during Tet, such as Banh chung, sticky rice cakes with pork and mung beans wrapped in banana leaves and gio, a sausage made of pork wrapped in banana leaves.