Celebrating the Mid-Autmn (Moon) Festival

One of the requirements for adoption from China is the promise of teaching your children appreciation of the Chinese culture.  We have been researching and practicing!  One of the really FUN things we did was attend the Peking Opera  last month.

Then, September 30th was the celebration of one of the most important holidays of the year for the Chinese people. We did actually celebrate that day, but its taken me awhile to remember to put it on the blog.  Since we found it interesting, we thought you might also.

Beginning as a harvest festival, Mid-Autumn Festival marked the time when farmers had finished gathering their crops.  The holiday is celebrated now as a time to be with family to give thanks for a good year.  According to our friend Jack  it is the Chinese equivalent of our Thanksgiving.

From the book Thanking the Moon by Grace Lin, "The traditions and myths of the Mid-Autum Festival center around the moon.  On the night of the festival, the moon is bright and full in the sky.  The roundness of the moon symbolizes harmony, and its fullness symbolizes wholeness, so families come together to celebrate those virtues."

"Families pay homage to the moon by eating mooncakes, small, round pastries with sweet fillings.  The cakes are formed in molds, and have elaborate designs on top.  Chinese characters for harmony or longevity, figures from moon legends, or flowers add to the mooncake's role as a symbol of good fortune and blessing."

We purchased our egg yolk mooncakes at a local Asian store.  We also got pineapple and red bean and some red bean and lotus seed mooncakes from the Mam Non Organization online. These cakes are not at all like a typical American cake, and opinions on their tastiness were very mixed with the group at our home that day.

One is really supposed to have an outdoors picnic at night, and observe the moon.  Our guests were here during the day, so we read our children's book about the holiday after lunch, then had mooncakes and tea for dessert.  Our family intended to go out after dark to look at the moon, but alas, it was too cloudy to see it here.

Grace Lin's book concludes like this, "Just as the moon always returns to its fullness, the festival continues to reunite families and inspire peace and gratitude."