Tet

Tet, or Tết Nguyên Đán, is the Vietnamese Lunar New Year and the country's most important public holiday. It celebrates the arrival of spring according to the lunar calendar and typically falls in late January or February. Festivities last several days and center on family reunions, ancestor veneration, and the welcoming of luck in the year ahead. Homes are cleaned and decorated with peach blossoms in the north or hoa mai (yellow apricot blossoms) in the south. Traditional foods such as banh chung, a square sticky rice cake with mung bean and pork, and banh tet, a cylindrical version, are prepared and shared. People give li xi, red envelopes with money, and the first visitor to a home in the new year, known as xông đất, is believed to influence the year’s fortune.

Tet Offensive: In 1968 during the Vietnam War, the Tet Offensive was a major North Vietnamese and Viet Cong campaign that launched attacks across South Vietnam during the Tet. The surprise operations had far-reaching political and psychological effects, helping shift U.S. public opinion and influencing the conduct of the war despite heavy losses by the attackers.

Other uses: In Hebrew, Tet is the ninth letter of the alphabet, written as ט and valued at nine in gematria. In modern biology, TET refers to a family of enzymes—TET1, TET2, and TET3—that catalyze DNA demethylation and play roles in epigenetic regulation.