Mid-Autumn Festival

September 9th was the Mid-Autumn Festival, a public holiday in Hong Kong.  September 9th was a Tuesday.  That is something different I have noticed about holidays in Hong Kong versus the US.  Except for a few holidays that always fall on a certain date (Christmas, Fourth of July), most US days are moved to a certain day of the week (usually Monday) to make them more convenient.  The US wants to celebrate the holiday, but they also want everyone (or at least people who get off for holidays) to have a 3 day weekend.  In China, most holidays depend on the lunar calendar and fall when they fall.  The only time they will move the official day is if the holiday falls on Sunday.  Then, they celebrate it with a day off on Monday.  If the holiday falls on Saturday, then the only people who have the day off are the ones who normally work on Saturday.  In a few weeks, the kids have a Wednesday and Thursday off for a public holiday.  I am guessing there will be a lot of people absent from school (and work) that Friday.

We tried to watch a video to find out the history of the Mid-Autumn Festival.  We watched 2 videos, that gave very different stories.  One thing that was the same, is the holiday celebrates Chang'e, the moon goddess of immortality.  The holiday is sometimes called the moon festival.  People eat mooncakes to celebrate, which are small cakes with a egg yolk filling.  The filling is usually circular, so when you bite into the cake it looks like a full moon.  The cakes are also baked in a special mold so they have Chinese characters imprinted on the top.  People light lanterns to celebrate as well.  The legend is the lanterns are lighting the way for Hou Yi, Chang'e's husband on Earth, to find his way to Chang'e on the moon.

We went to a celebration for the holiday in our neighborhood.  It was very nice.  The strange thing (to me) is even though the celebration is designed for kids, it didn't start until 8 PM.  My kids are usually in bed by then.  The celebration had food and drinks, games for the kids, and a raffle.  Everything was free.  The food and games both required tickets to help make things more fair, but you could get a free sheet of tickets whenever you ran out.  The kids came home with a bag of freebies.  Finally, around 9:30, Tommy told me he was tired and wanted to go home.  We had a great night. 

Tommy being silly for the camera. :)  They both got glow bracelets and fans.

  

The crowd