End-of-Lunar-Year Feast #1

Asian cultures have 2 major dinners (feasts) during their Lunar New Year (falls on Jan 23rd this year = Year of the Dragon) or Tet celebrations: one on new years day and the other to celebrate the end-of-the-lunar-year (normally done sometime during the last 3 weeks of the lunar year). These feasts also honor the hosts' ancestors. Only closest relatives & friends are invited to these dinners. I was surprised & honored to be invited to the Pham family's end-of-lunar-year feast - which I attended yesterday.
I counted 16 guests + 4 Pham family members = 20! The Pham's guests, like them, were "intellectuals" = journalists, doctors, medical/pharmaceutical sales reps - even a "university philosopher". Resulted in great discussions/debates re politics, economies, democracy, etc!
As I have said before, preparing a huge variety of great traditional foods is incredibly labor intensive. It took hours for Linh, her mother, grandmother, aunt, and the wife of a Pham family's close male friend (total of 5 people) to prepare the food. This is a pic of Linh and others preparing some of the food. Other ladies were on the roof terrace barbecuing pork and making a very good Vietnamese "flat/rice bread".
The very cute (as well as friendly) little girl in the pic is the daughter of one of the Pham family's relatives or friends (I was really confused about who was who).