A guide for parents and teachers

Lunar New Year for Kids: Tết 2027, Stories, Crafts

One calendar, several festivals. What Tết actually is, why it is not simply Chinese New Year with another name, and how to keep it with small children.

Lunar New Year is not one festival. It is one date — usually the second new moon after the winter solstice — kept as a different festival in a good many countries, with different food, different stories and different names. In 2027 that date is Saturday 6 February 2027, and the year it begins is the Year of the Goat.

In Vietnam the festival is called Tết Nguyên Đán, almost always shortened to Tết. It is the largest holiday of the Vietnamese year by a distance — the one people travel days for — and it is the one this page is mostly about, because it is the one most often described wrongly in English.

Tết is not Chinese New Year with a different name

This is the thing most English-language pages get wrong, usually with good intentions, and it is worth getting right before anything else.

The two festivals share a calendar. Vietnam and China both use the same lunisolar reckoning, so the dates almost always land on the same day — including in 2027. Almost. Vietnam computes its calendar on Vietnamese time and China on Chinese time, an hour apart, so a new moon that falls either side of midnight in one of them lands on a different day in the other. And the calendars can put a leap month in different places, which is the bigger divergence: in 1985 Vietnam kept its new year a full month before China kept its. So even the date is not guaranteed to be shared, and the assumption that it always is comes from nowhere except habit.

Everything the child actually experiences is different:

  • The cake. The centre of a Vietnamese Tết table is bánh chưng — a square cake of sticky rice built around mung bean and pork, wrapped in leaves and boiled for many hours. The square is the earth. In southern Vietnam the same thing is rolled into a cylinder, called bánh tét, and the cylinder is the moon. This is not a Chinese New Year dish and there is no equivalent to it there.
  • The flowers. Northern Vietnamese households buy a branch of peach blossom, hoa đào; central and southern households buy the yellow blossom called hoa mai. A Vietnamese person can tell which half of the country a Tết photograph was taken in from the colour of the branch in the corner.
  • Two of the animals. The Vietnamese zodiac runs rat, water buffalo, tiger, cat, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog, pig. Where the Chinese zodiac has an ox, Vietnam has a water buffalo — the animal that actually works a rice field. Where it has a rabbit, Vietnam has a cat. The other ten are the same, although the eighth is worth a footnote: the Vietnamese animal is a goat, and the Chinese one gets rendered into English as goat, sheep or ram depending on who is doing the translating. That last one is a translation argument. The buffalo and the cat are a real difference.
  • The stories. Different bodies of folklore entirely, which is the same lesson the Mid-Autumn Festival teaches — one night, one moon, and completely different tales told under it depending on where you are standing.

The useful frame for a child, and for a classroom, is this: Lunar New Year is the umbrella. Tết and Chinese New Year are two of the things underneath it, along with Korean Seollal, Mongolian Tsagaan Sar and other observances on or near the same date. Saying "Lunar New Year" when you mean the whole thing is accurate. Saying "Chinese New Year" when you mean the whole thing is the error — and it is the one a Vietnamese child in the room will notice.

What families do, in order

Tết has a shape, and the shape is easy to explain to a small child because it is mostly about a house being made ready.

  1. Before. The house is cleaned thoroughly, debts are settled, and arguments are meant to be finished. On the twenty-third day of the last lunar month the kitchen gods — Táo Quân, singly Ông Táo — leave the kitchen and ride a carp up to heaven to report on how the household has behaved all year, returning on New Year's Eve. Small children find the carp irresistible and the annual report faintly alarming, which is the correct response to both. Some families also raise a cây nêu, a bamboo pole sixteen to twenty feet tall with objects tied at the top.
  2. New Year's Eve. Giao thừa — the handover between the years. The family is at home for it. This is the emotional centre of the whole holiday, more than the day itself.
  3. The first visitor. Whoever crosses the threshold first in the new year is thought to set the household's luck for it — the custom is called xông đất or xông nhà. Families sometimes arrange for a specific, well-omened person to arrive first, which is a detail children find delightful.
  4. The first three days. Roughly: the first day for the immediate family and the ancestors, the second for friends, the third traditionally for teachers. Children give a greeting to each adult and receive lì xì — a red envelope with new banknotes in it, called mừng tuổi in the north. A tray of mứt, dried candied fruit that is hardly eaten at any other point in the year, sits out on the table for whoever comes.
  5. And nobody sweeps. Sweeping during Tết sweeps the year's luck out with the dust. This is why the cleaning happens beforehand, and it is the single detail every child in the room remembers.

Doing it with young children

A three-year-old will not retain the calendar, the zodiac or the history. They will retain that the house smelled different and somebody gave them a red envelope. Build for that.

  • Make the envelopes. Red paper, folded, one coin or one new note in each. A child who has made the envelope understands the giving far better than a child who is only handed one — and making twenty of them is a genuinely absorbing afternoon.
  • Clean something together and name it. Not a chore: a clearing-out of the old year. Then explain that the broom goes away for three days. Children enforce that rule with enormous seriousness.
  • Eat something with a shape you can explain. If you can get bánh chưng from a Vietnamese grocer, buy it rather than attempting it — it is an overnight job. Cut it and say what the square means. Anything round or sticky will carry the same conversation.
  • Put a branch somewhere. Any flowering branch in water. Say which half of Vietnam yours would belong to.
  • Teach one word, not ten. Tết is the whole word most children need. The point is that the festival has its own name, not that anybody is learning Vietnamese this week.

What to read

There is no Tết book in this catalogue yet — worth saying plainly on a page about Tết. What there is, and what works for the same evenings, is the folklore the festival sits inside.

Vietnamese folktales for children is the place to start: which stories to tell, which ones are gentle enough for a small child, and how to tell them if you do not speak the language. Most Vietnamese folktales are explanations — why there is a shadow on the moon, why a fruit looks the way it does — and a child in the asking phase takes to them immediately.

The Five Colors of a Gentle Heart collects twenty of them for ages 4–12, four for each of five virtues, with a colour attached to each — green for kindness, red for respect, yellow for trust, white for fairness, black for wisdom. Red for respect is a convenient thing to have in your pocket in the week of the red envelopes.

And the other end of the same year: the Mid-Autumn Festival in September is the children's festival of the Vietnamese calendar, where Tết is the family one. Reading the two guides together is the fastest way to see how differently the same lunar calendar is kept in different countries — which is the thing this page is really about.

Something to print

There are eighty-eight free coloring pages here as US Letter PDFs, with no email address required. Be straight with the child about what they are: they are drawn from the Mid-Autumn books — lanterns, moons and boats, not blossom branches — so they are the wrong festival. They are also a quiet half hour at a table on a day when the adults are cooking, which is what you actually need, and the eight countries in the set are a decent map of who else keeps a lunar calendar.

If you are teaching this

The single most useful correction you can make in a classroom is the umbrella one: Lunar New Year is the category, and Tết, Chinese New Year, Seollal and Tsagaan Sar are festivals within it, kept by different people in different ways on or near the same date. It takes thirty seconds and it is the part a child from any of those families will remember you for.

After that, the specificity test from the guide to multicultural children's books applies to every resource you are about to download: named things beat vague ones. Not a special cake but bánh chưng. Not a red packet but lì xì. A worksheet that says "Asian New Year" is telling you what it does not know.

Vietnamese and Chinese stories for the same age group

These are Mid-Autumn and folktale collections, not Tết books — there is no Tết title yet. They are the closest thing on the shelf for children of 4 to 12.

Common questions

When is Lunar New Year 2027?
Lunar New Year 2027 falls on Saturday 6 February 2027, and it begins the Year of the Goat. The night before — Friday 5 February — is the part most Vietnamese families care about; it is called giao thừa, the passing between the old year and the new. The date moves each year because it follows the lunar calendar: the new year starts on what is usually the second new moon after the winter solstice, which lands somewhere between late January and the third week of February.
Is Tết the same as Chinese New Year?
Same night, different festival. Vietnam and China use the same lunisolar reckoning, so the dates almost always coincide — but not always, and for two separate reasons. The two calendars are computed against different time zones an hour apart, so a new moon falling either side of midnight can land on different days in each country; and the leap months can be placed differently, which is what happened in 1985, when Vietnam kept its new year a full month before China did. What differs every year is everything else: the name (Tết Nguyên Đán), the food at the centre of the table (bánh chưng, a square cake of sticky rice, pork and mung bean wrapped in leaves), the flowers (peach blossom in northern Vietnam, yellow apricot blossom in the south), and even two of the zodiac animals — Vietnam has a water buffalo where China has an ox, and a cat where China has a rabbit. "Lunar New Year" is the umbrella term that covers all of it; "Chinese New Year" names one of the festivals under that umbrella, not the umbrella itself.
What do Vietnamese families actually do at Tết?
Clean the house completely beforehand, settle debts, and cook. On New Year's Eve the family is together for giao thừa. The first three days have a shape to them — the first for family and ancestors, the second for friends, the third traditionally for teachers. Children are given lì xì, small red envelopes with money in them, and are expected to offer a greeting first. And nobody sweeps, because sweeping during Tết is understood to sweep the year's luck out with the dust.
What is bánh chưng?
A square cake of sticky rice packed around mung bean and pork, wrapped in leaves and boiled for hours — often overnight, with the family sitting up around the pot, which is half the point of it. The square stands for the earth. In southern Vietnam the same idea is made in a cylinder instead and called bánh tét. Making it is a two-day job, so a family with small children usually buys it and still tells the child what the shape means.
What is lì xì, and how much goes in the envelope?
Lì xì is the red envelope of money given to children and to elders — in northern Vietnam the custom is more often called mừng tuổi. The amount is not the point and is usually small; what matters is that the notes are new and uncreased, that the envelope is red, and that the child says their greeting before receiving it. Giving crisp small notes to several children beats one large one to a favourite.
What can you do for Lunar New Year with a three- or four-year-old?
Three things carry it: clean something together and call it clearing out the old year, make red envelopes out of red paper and put a coin in each, and eat something round or sticky while telling them what the shape means. A very young child will not retain the calendar or the history. They will retain that the house smelled different and that somebody gave them a red envelope, and that is enough to make it a thing they expect next year.
Why does Vietnam have a cat where China has a rabbit?
The most common explanation is a collision of sound: the character used for the rabbit year, 卯, is close to the Vietnamese word mèo, meaning cat, and the cat is what stuck. Vietnam also keeps a water buffalo where China keeps an ox, which fits a country built on wet-rice farming. The other ten animals are the same in the same order, though the eighth is translated into English as goat, sheep or ram depending on the source — 2027 is that year, and Vietnamese calls it a goat.

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