Historic Main Street in Garden Grove will come alive with song, dance and vibrant floral displays with the second annual Flower Street festival, a free two-day celebration that will help Little Saigon mark the start of the Lunar New Year.
“Flower Street on Historic Main” is modeled after the Nguyen Hue Flower Street festival in Vietnam, organizers say, a Lunar New Year tradition featuring cultural and entertainment events and elaborate floral designs that attracts more than 2 million visitors annually. The Flower Street celebration joins a vibrant tradition of Lunar New Year events in Orange County.
This year’s Flower Street festivities include a retooled Lunar New Year’s Eve countdown on Feb. 9 and day-long street festivals on Feb. 10 and 11 that aim to bring the Flower Street tradition to an American audience while showcasing the richness of Vietnamese culture.
Organizers reflected on last year’s inaugural festival and previewed plans for this year’s event during a recent press conference at the District 1 Deli on Main Street that featured Vietnamese food and drink, a mini fashion show and remarks by various stakeholders.
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“Our efforts paid off,” Phillip Ho, a member of this year’s organizing committee, told the crowd about the 2023 festival. “We saw the families of Garden Grove and surrounding communities laughing and smiling and taking lots of pictures. We hope to bring the same energy and joy to Garden Grove with each additional event.”
More than 15,000 people attended last year’s festival, organizers said. They are hoping to attract even more this year.
During the festival, Main Street will be closed to traffic from Garden Grove Boulevard to Acacia Parkway so that participants can freely visit shops, take photos with floral displays sponsored by community groups and businesses, and participate in a variety of programming.
The first day of the festival will run from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Feb. 10. Scheduled activities include an opening ceremony, traditional lion dance, performances and games. The second day will run from 11 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. on Feb. 11 and also features lion dances and a full day of activities and entertainment.
As 2024 is the Year of the Dragon, dragon statues fashioned from colorful flowers will be stationed near the Historic Main Street sign to welcome attendees, said Sophie Tran, this year’s emcee who likened the festival to another popular American New Year’s tradition.
“Imagine the Rose Parade, except you get to stay and take pictures with these beautiful arrangements,” she said.
While the festival may provide aesthetically pleasing photo opps on the surface, organizers say it also serves a deeper purpose: to highlight the fullness of Vietnamese culture while uniting people across ethnicities and generations.
Orange County is home to the largest Vietnamese population outside Vietnam, Tran said, and publicly celebrating the start of the Lunar New Year is a fitting way to introduce residents of all backgrounds to Vietnamese traditions and culture.
Tran said that while local Lunar New Year events abound – annual celebrations are typically held in Westminster, Costa Mesa and Santa Ana for example – Flower Street on Historic Main is unique in that it intentionally showcases both traditional Vietnamese and modern Vietnamese American arts and culture.
In doing so, Tran said, organizers hope to unify multi-generational Vietnamese families and get them excited to ring in the Lunar New Year together, and to bring into the fold younger Vietnamese Americans who may feel disconnected from traditional Vietnamese culture because they don’t speak Vietnamese or are growing up far away from their ancestors’ homeland.
“Just because they don’t understand the language does not mean that they are no longer members of our community,” Tran said.
“The committee wants to put together events like this for the next generation to feel like they can travel the world and go to where their parents were born to celebrate Lunar New Year,” she said, “but also to introduce our culture to other communities as well.”
During the recent press conference, organizers highlighted some of the new additions to this year’s festival that are designed to appeal to larger audiences and bridge the generation gap.
Little Saigon TV and the Vietnamese Creatives Collective are hosting for the first time a Lunar New Year’s Eve countdown show, “Harmony of the Dragon,” from 7 p.m. to midnight on Feb. 9 at the nearby Garden Amp outdoor amphitheater. The event will feature merchandise and food and will blend traditional and modern with a line-up that includes artistic performances, spoken word poetry, a DJ set, stand-up comics, and more.
Kids and families are also encouraged to work together to decorate wagons with flowers and items from their gardens during a children’s wagon decorating contest on Feb. 10.
And children and young adults will don floral-inspired áo dài – traditional Vietnamese dress – during a flower-themed fashion show on Feb. 11.
Flower Street on Historic Main is being organized by the Vietnamese Sport Association of Southern California in collaboration with Little Saigon TV, and with support from a network of residents, businesses and groups, including the city of Garden Grove and the Garden Grove Downtown Business Association.
City Councilmember Stephanie Klopfenstein was among those who spoke about how the festival benefits the whole community.
“In Garden Grove we really celebrate our diversity,” she said. “This is such a wonderful way to promote cultural harmony and all of us coming together. We are extremely excited to have this once again on Main Street.”
“We hope,” she added, “it becomes a tradition for many years to come.”
For more information, visit Facebook.com/Tetflowerstreet or www.vsasocal.org.
