Holiday

This week we are celebrating Mid-Autumn Festival/Moon Festival and National Day. Moon Festival was technically yesterday (Sunday, 30 Sept), but we celebrated Saturday at a party thrown by a school family. National Day is today and commemorates the founding of the People’s Republic of China on 1 October 1949.

Normally these holidays fall into different weeks and KIA has a few days off each week, but because of the lunar calendar the holidays fell into the same week this year and allowed us the whole week off! Everyone at school was so excited for this week and Eric and I were no exception.

Mid-Autumn Festival/Moon Festival is viewed as kind of a Christmas like holiday in China. It is a time to gather your family and celebrate the end of fall harvest. It seems to revolve around the buying, selling, giving and sometimes eating of Moon Cakes. Moon Cakes are small pastry things filled with either meats (savory) or fruit (sweet). Yunnan province is famous for its ham Moon Cakes. The fruit filled cakes remind me of applets and cotlets and I think they taste okay. The meat ones, on the other hand, were not anything I need to try again. It is customary to give Moon Cakes to your family and friends at Moon Festival, thus leading up to the Festival there were huge tents on many street corners selling these cakes either individually or in gift boxes. Some were only a few RMB, while the larger gift box sets could go for around a 1,000 RMB. We were told that Moon Cakes can be the Chinese equivalent to the American Fruit Cake: they are obligatory to buy and give, but no one actually wants to eat them so they get passed around all season. To some extent we saw this was, indeed, true.



Moon Cake



 The party we attended on Saturday night was a big potluck dinner with both Chinese and expats attending. After dinner we each received a paper lantern, lit them, and made our way to Wicker Basket, a large international Bakery and Restaurant in the neighborhood. We rented out the top floor deck there so we could have a clear view of the moon (it didn’t work that way as it was really cloudy Saturday night.) We had dessert up on the deck while each person attending shared a poem or a song with the group. Some people told jokes, others told sentimental poems; one person sang a hymn. I don’t know if the sharing of poems and songs is a traditional Moon Festival activity, but the hosting family had always celebrated that way so we were happy to join in.

Today is National Day and honestly, I have no idea how this holiday is celebrated other than people just enjoying the day off and hanging out with family. We are certainly enjoying it. I am celebrating by making crock pot apple sauce and unpacking our final suitcase. Good times with the Warrens!

Getting the lanterns ready.



Lighting a lantern.



At Wicker Basket with our lanterns.



Everyone gathered on the deck.