Mid Autumn Festival
Wednesday was the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar calendar and thus Mid-Autumn Festival, an important Chinese cultural festival. The week before felt like midsummer, but Mother Nature adjusted herself to provide the correct environmental ambience. It was a beautiful brilliant blue sky day at a perfect temperature. It’s said to be a celebration of the end of the summer harvest, but there’s still much to harvest in my area.
There are various stories about the festival. One involves a woman who drank a potion designed to make her husband immortal. Immortality was to have been his thanks for saving the earth from too many suns. She flew to the moon and was unable to return to earth. She told the moon rabbit to make her a potion to allow her return to earth and is still waiting for it. Her husband pined for her and offered incense & fruit to the moon.
Another story relates how the Chinese hid a message of rebellion in moon cakes knowing it was pretty safe as the Mongols didn’t like eating them.
Mid-Autumn Festival is celebrated with a day off work and I was informed that those who manned the shops and so on were entitled to double pay. Many workers have 3days off work, but we only got one.
The Chinese also celebrate the day by getting together with family, eating moon cakes and observing the moon. Moon cakes are a pastry containing a vast variety of possible ingredients. Most are very sweet. The ones around here are composed of 5 nuts and also a red bean paste. They come in a variety of sizes.
Last week a program on TV showed small kids making clay figures of the Moon Rabbit as a means of having fun and learning about their traditional heritage.
The college gave the foreign teachers two boxes of moon cakes. It was most unexpected. The box is red and gold and the cakes are fairly large requiring a good appetite or a knife.
A box of the college moon cakes.
The interior of two of the moon cakes. There are at least 3 different types in the box.
