If this is the first time you’re reading about our parenting journey, I recommend you also check out our Unexplained Infertility blog posts.
For our Miracle Baby Benjimin’s first birthday, we threw quite a celebration.
In Vietnamese culture, your baby’s first birthday is a really important occasion. It’s called Thôi Nôi—or “leaving the cradle.” And the significance dates back to olden days, when living conditions were much harder and babies were much less likely to survive to a year. So if they did, whew—it was understandably a big cause for celebration! My direct translation of “Thôi Nôi” is like you’re saying “I’m done with the cradle! No more cradle, stop with the cradle.” (Vietnamese language is fun lol). So once you’re done with that cradle, you party.
For Benjimin’s first birthday or Thôi Nôi, we went *really* big! As I’ve written for similar milestones in his first year of life, you only get to celebrate your Miracle Baby’s first birthday once lol. Many of our guests compared it to a wedding reception, to give you a sense of how ‘big’ we went. (His second and subsequent birthdays will be much more chill, I swear lol).
I should also add that ‘going big’ is absolutely not necessary for your child’s Thôi Nôi. There’s really just one main ceremony/ritual that is involved (which I detail below) and that is usually pretty low-key, hosted at your home. But if you wanted some inspiration for what ‘going big’ for your baby’s Thôi Nôi could look like, this post can also offer you that, lol.
How We Celebrated Our Baby Benjimin’s Thôi Nôi (One-Year Birthday Tradition)
Benjimin’s Vietnamese Thôi Nôi consisted of a morning ceremony and an evening reception.
The morning ceremony is the more traditional part of the birthday experience, where there is an Object Picking Ritual (not the official terminology but best describes it lol).
The Object Picking Ritual
Family and close friends gather to watch as objects symbolizing different life / career paths are placed in front of the birthday baby who then reaches out to choose an object. The object that baby chooses is meant to indicate what their future might entail. It’s the job or life journey that the baby has to look forward to as it ‘leaves the cradle.’
The Object Picking Ritual is really the biggest and most symbolic part of the Vietnamese Thôi Nôi. There are very similar rituals in other cultures like Chinese and Korean (they’re called different things but essentially deal with a picking of objects to represent the future as well). And then we also do moments of praying before everyone had lunch prepared by my mom (thanks mom!)
The praying at baby-focused celebrations—if you are interested in more Vietnamese culture—is usually to folk lore deities called Bà Mụ, or Vietnamese goddesses / godmothers or midwives who are said to guide your baby through its early life. Some say the goddesses help with different traits and skills like teaching them how to suck (breastmilk) once they’re out of the womb. Others believe the goddesses are involved in different stages before the baby is even born—like through pregnancy, labour, and birth. You can learn more about that lore here.
We decided because we were holding an evening reception for more people to celebrate Benjimin’s big day, that we would have him do his Thôi Nôi Object Picking twice, so both groups at the ceremony and reception could be part of the special, cultural tradition. But typically, the picking only happens once!
For the morning group, to add a layer of interaction and involvement in the ritual, we also invited guests to guess which object Benjimin would choose for a chance to win a prize (you could do this without the prize as well but we thought we’d incorporate a little extra incentive because we had an unused gift card hanging around lol).
The objects we chose for Benjimin’s Thôi Nôi Object Picking included:
- Stethoscope
- Lucky red envelope
- Calculator
- Notebook
- Microphone
- Spatula
- Wrench
For literal interpretations, these objects could represent a career in medicine or health (stethoscope), being very wealthy (red envelope), working with numbers (calculator), becoming a writer or scholar (notebook), something in arts and entertainment (microphone), being a chef or baker, something with food for a living (spatula), and working in the trades (wrench).
Really you can make whatever interpretations you like with the objects, and you can choose whichever objects resonate with you. When we were doing research about Thôi Nôis, we saw scissors to represent like a barber or hairstylist, paint brush to represent an artist, we saw some Thôi Nôis included 12 objects to represent the 12 months of the year or the 12 Bà Mụ Vietnamese goddesses, and some Thôi Nôis only featured a handful of objects. It’s really up to the parents. Now that I think about it, we could have put a phone to represent some kind of digital / social media job like his mother lol.
- For the morning ceremony, Benjimin chose a calculator followed by a microphone.
- For the evening ceremony, Benjimin chose the microphone.
So you could say Benjimin is born to be a star! As a more literal interpretation. We also really liked the more broad interpretation that the microphone may not just represent arts and entertainment, but rather something about Benjimin using his voice to change the world.
How special!
Below are a few more photos from the morning ceremony and then a breakdown of Benjimin’s special evening reception.
Note: We hired Edmonton party / event decor specialists Party & Confetti to create backdrops for both morning and evening ceremony and the incredible letter and balloon backdrop you see for the Thôi Nôi Object Picking Ritual was their wonderful creation.
They matched the balloon colours to the rainbow wall we have in our home! So cute!
If you have an event going on in 2025 and want a stunning focus point or photo op spot, you can get 10% off your package with my code LINDA. This can be applied to any order at checkout on Party & Confetti’s online store, including on top of any sales or discounts that are already listed. You must book by Dec. 31, 2024 for events happening in 2025. I highly recommend! If you are reading this post after the booking deadline, I still encourage you to hire Party & Confetti! They do such stunning work.
The Evening Reception
So as I mentioned, the Object Picking was the focal point of the morning portion of Benjimin’s Vietnamese Thôi Nôi, and really the main cultural/traditional aspect of celebrating a Thôi Nôi.
For for the evening reception (remember, wedding reception vibes), we added a few special touches (mostly food and drink-related lol) that were not necessarily cultural or traditional but was simply tailored towards our / my interests lol.
12-Course Dinner (South Silk Road)
We chose to hold Benjimin’s One Year Vietnamese Thôi Nói evening reception at South Silk Road Chinese Restaurant in south Edmonton and the food and service was extremely good! Guests shared the multi-course meal (12 dishes!!) family style. The meal was lit. Literally lol. I know I’m too old to say lit I just wanted to say it to reference the spice, ha!
South Silk Road specializes in southwest China Yunnan and Sichuan style cuisine so by default it’s spicy. In fact the menu items note one 🌶️ two 🌶️🌶️ or three 🌶️🌶️🌶️ chili spice levels (0 is not an option). We did ask them to tone down the spice a biiiiit given Mike’s very white family and majority of Caucasian friends lol but didn’t want to take away from their cuisine specialty too.
The food got rave reviews from our guests! Many had never heard of or tried the restaurant before. It’s seriously a very underrated restaurant serving seriously flavourful food.
The 12-courses for Benjimin’s Thôi Nói dinner were:
- Mouth Watering Chicken
- Cold Noodle Yunnan Style with Pork
- Puer Shrimp
- Deep-fried Green Beans with Bean Sauce
- Kung Pao Chicken
- Beef with Black Pepper and Onions
- Fish Filet Soup with Pickled Cabbage and Chili
- Yunnan Style Ground Pork with Green Pepper and Salted Turnip
- Gai Lan with Woodear Mushroom
- Sweet and Sour Ribs with Sesame
- Fried Potato Green Pepper and Egg Plant
- Shrimp Fried Rice
We were really happy with our pick of venue for Benjimin’s party.
We were able to rent out the whole restaurant, and as I’ve said, the food and service were so excellent!! If you check out South Silk Road from this post, tell Coco I sent ya!
Cheesecake Cups (Layered by Rissa)
Benjimin’s Thôi Nôi included a dessert table featuring treats from a few local bakers like Layered by Rissa. This Edmonton-based, woman and Black-owned business whips up beautiful and delicious cakes and desserts. I had tried the mango cheesecake cup during Feed the Soul Dining Week in February and was impressed!
So for Benjimin’s party we ordered mango and mini egg cheesecake cups and they were so good! Some people were stockpiling the cups on their way out, for real lol. Literally nothing was leftover and I was actually pretty sad that I couldn’t take any extras home lol.
Cake Mash (The Nancy Bakes)
We have tried some really tasty treats from The Nancy Bakes before, so for Benjimin’s Thôi Nôi we hired Nancy to supply her ‘Cake Mash’ for guests. Cake mashes are meant to be a “mash” of various flavours Nancy works with for other orders from that week. We went non-customized (let her choose!) so she incorporated 2-3 flavours into these individual servings. Nancy also baked a small smash cake for Benjimin (that was just a mom + dad + Benjimin moment), and Oilers-colour cupcakes for Benjimin’s much smaller kids birthday party at our home the week after.
Cheese Tarts (Pablo Cheese Tarts)
If you’re ever in Old Strathcona, it’s very worth popping into Pablo Cheese Tarts for some of these iconic, delicious, cheese-based tarts with double-baked crunchy crusts! I’ve included Pablo Cheese Tarts in different neighbourhood food + art tours I’ve done in the past, and thought guests would love to enjoy these tarts for Benjimin’s Thôi Nôi. We ordered a mix of Original, Strawberry Daifuku, and Mango-flavoured cheese tarts.
The entire dessert table honestly was cleaned out by the end of the night. Everything was a hit! So delicious.
Build Your Own Bubble Tea (Boba Bar)
We were actually the first party to ever hire Sherwood Park, Alberta-based Boba Bar for their incredible DIY BUBBLE TEA STATION! 💛✨🧋😍 Boba Bar is one of my favourite locally owned bubble tea shops in the Edmonton area and timing worked out that they had just started to promote their new bubble tea catering option as I was planning Benjimin’s big bash.
As a self-proclaimed bubble tea enthusiast myself (see my 7 days a week Bubble Tea video here lol), this felt like the perfect fit for the event. With Boba Bar’s catering options you can either do bulk orders with premade drinks or book a bubble tea station at your event like we did.
In that case, Boba Bar comes to set up the flavours and toppings for you and there’s also an option to hire staff to scoop and serve at the event (which we did!) Benjimin’s Boba Bar was a beloved component to this celebration.
We ordered three 3-gallon dispensers / 3 flavours:
- Passionfruit tea
- Roasted milk tea
- Taro milk tea
Along with 6 topping options:
- Tapioca pearls (Boba)
- Lychee jelly
- Strawberry jelly
- Mango popping boba
- Passionfruit popping boba
- Grass jelly
One gallon is the minimum order for your event.
As with the many amazing local vendors we hired to bring Benjimin’s Thôi Nôi to life, I can totally see this being SO POPULAR AT LOCAL WEDDINGS!! But also birthdays like Benjimin’s, corporate and other events and social gatherings. If you book, let them know you heard about them through me!! We don’t get anything special, it’s just nice to know lol.
Thôi Nôi Decor – Framed Professional Photos (Vintage Duck Photography)
We didn’t have a ton of specific decor at Benjimin’s Thôi Nôi but we had just recently been gifted a very meaningful One-Year ‘Noodle Pull’ Milestone studio photoshoot with Jessica at Vintage Duck Photography, which included some photos of Benjimin in casual clothing as well as a traditional Vietnamese Áo dài gown that we thought it might be nice to print / blow up / and frame to include at different points of the party venue. We printed them glossy at 20×30 (really huge lol) from Staples and ordered frames from Amazon. These turned out so nice!
Thôi Nôi Decor – Benjimin Birthday Hat String Lights and Three-Tier Fountain Cake Stand
I was inspired by a decor idea I saw online where someone put paper party hats on photos of their baby and clipped them onto string lights. It seemed like an easy enough DIY project, and my friend Diane was kind enough to offer to put it together as we were out of country a few weeks before the big Thôi Nôi.
My mom ordered a cake from the Hong Kong Bakery, which she presented on three tiers using a cake / fountain stand she’s had for probably three decades lol. It was extravagant but I suppose that fit the vibe of a wedding reception-style one-year birthday party, haha. The cake was set in front of the string light party hat photos so it made for a really nice area at the party.
We also re-used these for Benjimin’s kids party we held at our house the following week!
Super cute.
Thôi Nôi Decor – Balloon and Giant Letters Backdrop from Party & Confetti
As mentioned, we hired Edmonton party / event decor specialists Party & Confetti to create backdrops for both morning and evening portions of Benjimin’s Thôi Nôi.
They put together a fantastic balloon and giant letters backdrop that served as a wonderful backdrop for the evening’s announcements, both morning and evening Object Picking Rituals, and photos with family and friends throughout the evening. The backdrop in the evening also featured a bunch of ‘travel’ visuals, as something we shared with the team when they were coming up with the concept, was how proud we were to have travelled so much with Benjimin in his first year. They even built one of those cute destination signs with actual locations of where Benjimin travelled that we were able to take home with us after the party. So special!
SAVE WITH MY CODE WHEN YOU BOOK WITH PARTY & CONFETTI!
If you have an event going on in 2025 and want a stunning focus point or photo op spot, you can get 10% off your package with my code LINDA. This can be applied to any order at checkout on Party & Confetti’s online store, including on top of any sales or discounts that are already listed. You must book by Dec. 31, 2024 for events happening in 2025. I highly recommend!
If you are reading this post after the booking deadline, I still encourage you to hire Party & Confetti! They do such stunning work.
Thôi Nôi Photos & Video
As I’m writing this blog post a full 9 months after the party happened (oops, where did the year go?! lol) I actually referenced the beautiful birthday photos taken by Edmonton photographer Jordon Hon of JOHO PHOTOS to remind me of different aspects of the party as it has been so long I didn’t fully remember some details off the top of my head, lol.
It was so nice to sift through all the photos to select ones to include in this post and remind ourselves of Benjimin’s big day. And like, the photos are SO GOOD. Right?!?
We also hired Edmonton photographer / videographer Karly Watson of KLIQUE THIS to film and edit some special footage from the party that has mostly just been for our personal use so far, but that I may also roll out as very belated videos at some point. I was sort of waiting for this blog post to be completed before I shared more content from the day I think, and then it took me almost a full year to get to the blog lol.
It was important for us to capture our baby’s Thôi Nôi in both formats (photo and video with Jordon and Karly) as well as capture something in-studio (photo session with Jessica) to mark his one-year. It’s something I recommend for parents wanting something tangible and memorable to easily look back on your child’s milestones!
We also printed a physical photo book from Mixbooks with images from the celebration! As Benjimin has gotten older he loves looking at and through photos of himself and our family.
And unpictured, we also put together a slideshow of photos with scenes from Benjimin’s first year that played in the background of both the morning and evening events.
So that’s pretty much How We Celebrated Baby Benjimin’s One-Year Birthday (Vietnamese Thôi Nôi). It was a super special, meaningful, customized day that really worked for us.
As I said, your baby’s first birthday (and if you’re Vietnamese, the baby’s Thôi Nôi ceremony) may not be as extravagant as we went with ours, but I hope seeing the breakdown of how we approached Benjimin’s Thôi Nôi is useful in helping you plan your celebration.
I know we Googled and looked at a bunch of different other Thôi Nôi blog entries (in addition to talking to my parents) to formulate what we wanted to do with ours.
As a child to immigrants who have now lived in Canada longer than they lived in their home country, and one who is always trying to connect with my family’s heritage, being involved in and then being able to write and share about these cultural traditions (like with Benjimin’s One Month Birthday Vietnamese Ngày Đầy Tháng and this blog post), are extra meaningful for me.
I know there are others like me who are hoping to integrate the same traditions into their life experiences and I know how helpful seeing how others do it can be!
Thank you to our family and friends (and party vendors!) for being a part of Benjimin’s first year and his Thôi Nôi birthday bash. We were so thrilled to show our Miracle Baby so much love that day (and every day!)
You may not know but it took us nearly 10 years to conceive our Miracle Baby! I like to make sure I include that in Parenting/Family content because I know so many people struggle to have a baby (like we did) and I hope seeing our happy ending (or new beginning, however you want to look at that) gives you hope if you are going through a difficult time conceiving.
If this is the first time you’re reading about our infertility journey, I recommend you start at this 2018 blog post! You can find all my infertility-related blog posts here or browse my Infertility Instagram Story Highlights here, my IVF Abroad Instagram Story Highlights, and my blog post: After trying for nearly a decade—we got pregnant! Naturally. Somehow.
Linda
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1 Comment
Baby B is no longer a baby! Loved this!