Meow…. meow… meow… it is tết, it is my time

That must be what our cat said when going around our house. He had just won a great victory: catch five mouse on the last day of the Tiger year. My mom was very surprised. Well, it was for Tết, he would answer proudly.

It was very cold when I came back home. I thought I had been used to with that crazy weather so it could not give me any trouble. I was wrong. I got cold and then, coughing for some days. Hmm, I had planned to visit our relatives (on my mother’s side) with my mom and my sister before tết but getting sick made me cancel that plan. When my mom and my sister went, I intended to stay in bed for all day to get over that silly cold. This planed was destroyed, too. A pack of bird, nearly a hundred bulbuls I believed, were very excited with china-berry fruits in our garden so they called each others and woke me up. They must be afraid that I would feel alone so they stayed there and sang for the whole morning, then going somewhere else to rest in the noon and coming back in the afternoon. Soon they showed me that their timetable was fixed, hehe. They must know that they are always safe when playing in our garden.

At the first time I cooked since I came home, I gave my mom, my sister and her friend a chance to taste undone rice. They comforted themselves that was the sign of good luck, hehe. That was one of many reasons my mom and my sister decided they would rather cook our meals. Their delicious foods always were too attractive to me to resist. When I prepared to go back here, my mom had to say that she thought I should buy a new pair of shoe and restart my morning exercise. However, they still dared to let me boil bánh chưng (and their worry only left when they saw all bánh chưng were welldone). This year all of us liked to eat bánh chưng so we had a place of bánh chưng for every meal. A new thing of this tết was my sister decided to make lạp xường (sausage). I had not known that making it cost a lot of time. Seeing my sister and I made it, my mom laughed and said that we should have prepared for it for long time before. We always have a lot fun when making food together.

This year I could not come back on my grandpa’s birthday so he kept some delicious foods for me. When I ate all those foods that make me full, my grandma asked me to make a haircut for grandpa. She told stories about their youth, about their siblings while I cut his hair short. My grandpa has two sisters and five brothers. One of his sisters just called and said that she would visit us on the fourth day of New Year with some of her sons and daughters. I teased grandpa who was the most handsome guy in our family when he was young. He smiled and said “well, who knows?” but my grandma laughed and said “of course that was your grandpa. He is always the best. You think why I married such a lazy guy like him? hm”. My mom could not stop laughing. She told me that I would be starved if I were a hairdresser. Nearly an hour after that I finished. My grandma said it was nice. My grandpa satisfied with his new hair. Well, I would open a hair salon with “Grandpa” written on the signboard one day, who knows.

Like other Tết, we had a lot of get-together meals with our uncles, aunts and our cousins. Tết is time to family reunion and I enjoyed every minute of this Tết. Staying with family is always a great time.

Hope the Cat brings much happiness to everyone in this New Year :heart:

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