From where I stand Tet is a difficult festival to write about. For Vietnamese it is festivals, it is THE annual festival, it is more than that, it is the epitome of all that is held socially valuable. The key element is family. Just as it was in Scotland, it is the time to re-unite and renew. It is synonymous with the return to the village or countryside, going back to one's roots. A substantial majority of Vietnam's people are still rural, belonging to villages and small towns, and most of urban people are only a generation removed from those roots.

The delight in belonging to a living community can be expressed, as it is vociferously, but not shared. Essentially outsiders become even more outsiders, whatever the sharing of drink and food and fun may be. Hence the reservation about writing about Tet. The meaning is lost in translation.

Tet is about families, about the people still in the family house, about the members who live and work away, but it is also about the departed. A key task is to make this last group feel fully welcome and involved. A visit to the family tombs, to encourage the ghosts to come back to the house, marks the start of ceremonies, these, as often here, are brisk affairs - a formula similar to Christian prayers takes only a few minutes. Over the coming days those of previous generations will come to where a choice selection of foods is set out on the house alter. Appetites are feeble from this section of the community, and after a decent interval what has not been consumed is available for hungry mortals.

Locally the main item likely to be displayed on the alter is a chicken; cooked whole and presented squatting down, with neck and head in typical chicken pose; odd, of course, as it is minus feathers. The other key celebratory food is the Tet or chung cake. The ritual preparation of this happens 30 hours previously, for it must be cooked overnight very slowly. Made of sticky rice with a heart of pork and nuts, it is very exactly wrapped in banana leaves to make a neat box a few inches across. These green packets are exchanged between households each hoping to outshine the other.

Drinking is inevitably central to Tet, but here I will pass over it and let you read elsewhere [Link to Vodka] partly as it is only central to half the population, women no more drink at Tet than at any other time. Extra drinks do appear: there is more often the alternative of bought beer, and sometimes special imports of rice wine from the south, or a vodka made with pickled snake, or hornets, or, rather creepily as in our café, in a bell jar, with a goat foetus.

All aspects of New Year here are familiar to the ex-pat Scot who is old enough to have enjoyed Hogmanay before it was hijacked by consumerism. And the core ingredient is the social exercise for which eating and drinking may be just the excuse: the visiting, circulating, having the time to indulge guests and knowing one will be indulged whatever the time. Gifts are brought of food, drink and money for children - this latter often amounting to considerable sums, when dozens of smallish tokens are added together.

The flow goes on for days, round the neighbours, round the extended families, round the friends and round the people we would like to see as friends in the newly opened year. So much emotional capital has been built up through the year that the expenditure can be truly extravagant!

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