Mid Autumn Festival

At the end of September we celebrated the Mid-Autumn Festival, which I think is my favourite of the major Chinese holidays. It’s low key, and the moon is bright in the sky trying to bestow upon us earthlings some wisdom and good luck, and you get mooncake.

I’m Chinese but only sort of Chinese and so I’m googling how to celebrate these things. I stumble across gems like “Over the years, some traditions like worshiping the moon have slowly started fading away and been replaced with new ones like shopping and travel” and then figure I’m okay just winging it. I end up watching Youtube videos about Chang’e and her rabbit and ordering tins of mooncake for Caleb and Naomi’s teachers online from T&T. While Caleb was at some sort of organized fighting activity involving chokeholds and smelly gis, I took the girls to east Chinatown to try and buy some lanterns. We couldn’t find any lanterns, so we had some pho instead, and then the next day Jon had to buy some supplies so we could make our own ramshamble ones, writing prophecies and blessings in terrible and crooked characters.

Ramshamble or not, we went for our midnight, moonlight walk, staring up at that big beauty, heavy in the sky, dreaming big, dreaming small, dreams and magic floating all around.