Ringing in the Lunar New Year

By Cecile Nguyen

Happy New Year!

In case you didn't know, Monday was Lunar New Year, more commonly known as Chinese New Year.

Tet, as it is called in Vietnamese, is one of my all-time favorite holidays, and I was pretty excited to celebrate the Year of the Water Buffalo -- Ox to the Chinese -- with my family.

Lunar New Year is way cooler than its Western Jan. 1 counterpart. In place of fireworks, we set off strings of red firecrackers, which is like having fireworks in your front yard.

Red is a common theme in Tet, as it symbolizes luck.

My family and I filled our house with peach flowers and branches from the red cherry blossom tree in our front yard.

We ate sweet sticky rice dyed red and Hat Dua, roasted watermelon seeds which are also dyed red, along with other Vietnamese food.

Something else that is unique to Tet is the tradition of children receiving money in small red envelopes from their elders.

These red envelopes represent luck and good fortune for the upcoming year.

But with this rotten U.S. economy, even Tet is taking a hit.

After spending all of my Christmas money, I typically replenish my wallet with money from Tet, which I guess you can look at as a second Christmas that comes roughly a month after the real one.

I say roughly because, like its name suggests, the date of Lunar New Year depends on the cycle of the moon and is not the same every year.

My Tet money this year was only equivalent to half of my earnings last year.

Not only are people not spending their money, but my uncles and aunts are holding out on their favorite Santa Clara niece.

School is getting expensive. I'm not going to lie, I really was going to use that Tet money for school. I still haven't bought some of my textbooks, and midterms are fast approaching.

With no Tet money at my disposal, I'm going to have to allocate some of the funds I saved for coffee and gas to buy books. I'm still debating if getting books is really worth giving up a quarter's worth of coffee.

But with no immediate cash flow in my bank account, I'm going to have to wait until graduation in June to get easy money from my family.

The Year of the Ox is predicted to be one of slow and steady progress, according to the Vietnamese zodiac. So we'll just have to ride out this crappy economic climate and hopefully by year's end, the economy will be rolling again.

And come next Lunar New Year, I could be expecting a little bit more in those small red envelopes.