Mooncake Mid-Autumn Festival
The Mid-Autumn Festival, which falls on the 15th day of the eighth month of the Chinese lunar calendar, is meant to be a joyous festival about celebrating the harvest, family and friendship.
One of the most important part of celebrating the Mid-Autumn Festival is to buy and give mooncakes to your friends and family. This is an important tradition amongst the Chinese peoples around the world and most Chinese families will usually end up with several boxes of mooncakes, some from friends, relatives and even work colleagues.
The mooncake is round, like the moon, and this represents reunion. During the festival, people will often throw a party at their homes and place a table out in the garden under the full moon.
On the table will be placed mooncakes and a pot of incense, and the family and friends will light joss sticks and pray to Chang’E, the moon goddess.
By eating slices of mooncake together, it signifies that those who partake in eating it will be reunited in the future. If you eat mooncakes given to you as a gift by other people, it is a sign that you will meet them again.
Nowadays the Mid-Autumn Festival is seen as a good opportunity to have a big outdoor event in a park at night.
Giant lanterns depicting traditional Chinese gods and goddesses, as well as figures from classical period Chinese novels like Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Journey to the West are built, supported by electronics.
Creators of these events also try to replicate a period Chinese garden with lotus lanterns on lakes, pagodas and other traditional period Chinese designs and decorations from before the 19th century.
If you have the chance to visit one of these events in a Southeast Asian country, for example, the Mid-Autumn Festival in Singapore or the Hong Kong Lantern Festival, it is well worth the visit in order to experience Chinese culture.
