Skip to main content

Christmas in Vietnam (Radio Package)


OUT: NUIG News

Christmas is a time of joy, a time for love and cheer, a time for making memories, to last throughout the year. 

And as we all gear up for the holiday season here in Ireland, it’s easy to forget about the different Christmas celebrations happening all around the world. 

We may be used to the classic Christmas dinner of turkey with stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy. But in Colombia they eat Patacones, a type of potato pancake, while in Greenland you’d eat whale blubber for dinner, and if you were in Japan, you’d eat KFC as your traditional festive feast.

As children across the country draft their letters to Santa Claus. The kids in Austria are worrying about Krampus, a half-goat, half-demon, who punishes the Children who misbehave. In Iceland, there’s the Christmas Cat who eats up any little ones who haven’t received new clothes on Christmas day. And in Switzerland there’s Santa’s sidekick Schmutzli who helps to decide whether you’ve been naughty or nice. 

While 10,000 kilometres away, in Vietnam, winter traditions are quite different. A predominately Buddhist country, most living there have never seen snow, and there is no such thing as Santa Claus on Christmas morning. 

We caught up with some Vietnamese locals to discuss what they would normally do around the Christmas season. 

[CLIP]

The most important winter tradition in Vietnam is the Tet Holiday or Vietnamese Lunar New Year. The celebration lasts for a total of 9 days and during this time most travel home to their families and visit the graves of their ancestors. 

[CLIP]

While Tet may be the time Vietnamese people visit their family. For many expats, who are living and working, the coronavirus restrictions in Europe mean it’s impossible to come home for Christmas. We spoke to some of those who have emigrated to Asia about their plans this year.

[CLIP]

For many people out there facing their first Christmas away from home, the shock of a new culture may be unusual, but the values that underpin them are the same. Family, community, and kindness. Whether you’re in Vietnam or Ireland, Saigon or Sligo. 

Merry Christmas from Stephen Holland, NUIG News.




Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

David Bowie (1969)

The Bowie Project #2 - David Bowie aka Space Oddity aka Man of Words/Man of Music (1969) Click here to listen to an audio version of this review on Spotify Many call this the first true David Bowie album. After the commercial failure of his first record two years earlier (also called David Bowie ), the future Ziggy Stardust sought to reinvent himself and shed his jaunty music hall vaudeville past, and what better way to erase everyone’s memory of the first album than by giving the next one the exact same name? The origins of this album begin with the promotional movie Love You till Tuesday   which Kenneth Pitt, Bowie’s new manager, hoped would showcase his talents and introduce him to a larger audience. The film ended up being shelved and was not released until 1984 when it finally appeared on VHS. The half-hour promo was originally planned to include seven previously released Bowie songs and one mime performance, but before shooting began Bowie wrote a new song for the fi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Toy (2000)

The Bowie Project #27 – Toy (2000) Hot off the heels of touring his latest album, Hours , in 1999, David Bowie decided he wanted to utilise the energy of his touring band and record a quick surprise album for his fans. The project he envisioned would be made up of re-recordings of his old material from the 1960s and described as “Not so much Pin Ups II as an Up Date I ”. Work on this sixties album began in July 2000 under the working title Toy . No longer working with his previous collaborator and former Tin Machine guitarist Reeves Gabrels due to creative differences the lineup now consisted of his touring band guitarist Earl Slick, bassist Gail Ann Dorsey, pianist Mike Garson, frequent collaborator Mark Plati, and drummer Sterling Campbell. The band rehearsed songs at Sear Sound Studio in New York City and recorded them as live tracks with Plati stating the idea was to keep things fast and loose, record them quick and not focus too much on perfection. Or has Bowie himself said:...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sound Thinking Episode 22 - Synth-Pop

This radio series, that originally aired on Flirt.FM a licensed student radio station for NUIG, takes one particular type of music, subculture, sub-genre, or moment in time each week and examines it in detail. Listening to some of the best or underrated music of that time and looking at the history behind it. Episode 22 explores the world of synth-pop, a subgenre of new wave that first became prominent in the late 1970s and features the synthesizer as the dominant musical instrument. It was prefigured in the 1960s and early 1970s by the use of synthesizers in progressive rock, electronic, art rock, disco and particularly in the Krautrock of bands like Kraftwerk. It arose as a distinct genre in Japan and the United Kingdom in the post-punk era as part of the new wave movement of the late 1970s to the mid-1980s.
Post a Comment
Read more