Tết portraits in red and blossom

Tết, the Lunar New Year, is the most important holiday in Vietnam. Families gather, homes are cleaned and decorated, ancestors are honoured at the household altar, and people visit relatives, friends and pagodas in the first days of the year.

It is also the season of Tết portraits. In the weeks around the holiday, many people dress up, often in red or in áo dài, and pose among flowers. Red stands for luck and celebration; blossoming branches stand for the new spring. In the north the traditional Tết flower is the pink peach blossom, in the south the yellow apricot blossom (hoa mai).

The first portrait captures the domestic side of the holiday: a woman in a red dress pouring tea beside Tết flowers, the kind of moment that fills the first mornings of the year when guests come to visit. The next two frames move outdoors, a conical hat among peach blossoms and a red dress among blossoming branches.

The last photograph steps back from the people to an object that is part of almost every Tết ritual: bundles of incense, ready to be lit at the altar.

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Photos: ghostw1997, phuongnh258, luissteven, tho on Pixabay, used under the Pixabay Content License. These are not my photographs.