Why is boiled chicken never missing from the Lunar New Year feast?
Our Vietnamese culture in the Lunar New Year feast, or in funerals, weddings, is not just a meal but also contains deep meanings about beliefs and traditional culture.
Chicken, especially boiled chicken, is an offering, especially in Lunar New Year feasts, to remember ancestors, to pray for the protection of the souls for the living, is the continuity of the good traditional values left by the ancient people… That is why, the ancients often said that every feast must have chicken. Because this is a thousand-year-old traditional culture of our people.
In today’s life, there are many more attractive dishes. But on the Lunar New Year feast, especially for the ancestral altar on Tet, boiled chicken is still an indispensable dish.

Why must Vietnamese Lunar New Year feasts have chicken?
According to researchers of ethnic cultures, since ancient times, roosters have become sacred animals in many religious systems and worship rituals as offerings. Especially, for an agricultural country like ours, the image of a rooster is even a more familiar symbol for many reasons. Chickens are domesticated by mankind from a very early age. Roosters have the habit of crowing at dawn, their crowing resounds far and wide, serving as an alarm clock for the community, and it has become a sign of the time for people to be aware and conscious of the day. Chickens are also close friends of each of us.
That is in terms of practical aspects, considering the spiritual aspect, chickens, especially roosters, are very important in the worship of the sun with residents growing rice in water. The rooster calls the sun to create the time frame.

The custom of offering boiled chicken on Tet probably also came from a folk tale, telling that in the past, the Jade Emperor saw the earth was cold and damp, so he sent ten suns to shine day and night. But when the earth has turned dry and cracked, and the Jade Emperor still did not call the sun back, humans and plants suffered from drought. Therefore, that cultural trait has been handed down to this day.
Information for reference and contemplation