DM Monitoring
HANOI: Regardless of the COVID-19 pandemic, Vietnamese parents have tried their best to bring their children the fullest and happiest Mid-Autumn festival ever.
A young woman wearing a mask crept among the crowd step by step on Hang Ma Street, Vietnam’s capital city of Hanoi on Thursday evening. In her arms, a toddler reached out to the colorful stuff hanging over his head.
Across the street in Hanoi’s iconic Old Quarter, arrays of shops, stalls and walking hawkers were selling technicolor star-shaped lanterns and toys hand-crafted in paper and bamboo. From nearby corners, dynamic sounds of drums and live music beat the excitement up.
Dao Hong Chi, 31, was showing her two-year-old son the traditional toys for the Mid-Autumn Festival, or Tet Trung Thu in Vietnamese, which falls on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month every year.
NO LONGER LIKE BEFORE
The festival is celebrated on the eighth lunar month’s full moon night, the most charming and picturesque night of the year, marking the end of the rice harvest in the Red River Delta around the Vietnamese capital originally.
Parents were busy during the harvest, so the holiday after that was a chance to spend time with their children. Over the years, it had been widely recognized as a festive event for kids across the Southeast Asian country.
