Describe a food people eat on special occasions

I'd like to talk about bánh tét, a cylinder-shaped sticky rice cake that people in southern Vietnam eat at Tết, the Lunar New Year. In the north they make a square version, but where I come from, Trà Vinh, it's always the long one. The ingredients are simple: glutinous rice, mung bean paste and a strip of fatty pork in the centre, all wrapped tightly in banana leaves and tied with string. My family also does a sweet kind with banana instead of pork, and a purple one coloured with magenta leaves. The difficult part is the cooking. The cakes have to be boiled for about eight hours, so on the twenty-eighth of the last lunar month we wrap around forty of them in the afternoon and then keep a wood fire going in the yard all night. Somebody has to stay awake to top up the water. When I was a child I begged to be that person every year, and every year I was asleep by ten. As for why it's eaten then, there are practical and symbolic reasons. Practically, it keeps for several days without a fridge, which mattered when markets closed over the holiday. Symbolically, the first cakes go on the family altar for our ancestors before anyone else eats. And honestly, the making matters more than the eating. It's the one night when three generations sit around the same pot. Last year my grandmother watched me tie a cake, sighed and said, 'It'll fall apart, but at least you came home.' It did fall apart. We ate it anyway, fried in slices the next morning, which is, in my opinion, the best way to have it.