Mid-Autumn Festival: The Thanksgiving of the Orient

Last Friday was Mid-Autumn Festival! （中秋节, which literally means "mid autumn festival", in that order.) This is a traditional Chinese holiday where you have a family reunion and a big meal, based on a legend that everybody has their own version of--just like Thanksgiving!

You also eat mooncakes, which are pastries approximately the size of a large hockey puck, filled with pretty much anything you could imagine.

I like the nut, yam, and egg, but I detest the meat-filled ones. Around mid-Autumn Festival mooncakes are everywhere in China, and in Singapore (which, just to reiterate, is NOT PART OF CHINA) they are also quite common this time of year. Traditionally, you would then sit around outside at night with your extended family, admiring the moon and writing poetry about it. That doesn't go on anymore.

However, being that although the majority of the people living in Singapore are of Chinese descent, it is NOT China (think America--majority of people are of European descent, but it's definitely not Europe!), they don't do everything quite the same. They've actually combined another Chinese holiday, the Lantern Festival (元宵节，which does not translate to lantern festival in any way, shape or form). However, the Lantern Festival is 15 days after Chinese New Year (which is like Christmas and has a lot of traditions and vacation time and such), so I guess they wanted to spread some of the cool stuff to one of the holidays that was kind of boring.

So here's the Lantern Festival. Basically you carry paper lanterns around. You can also hang them up and just hand out or have a picnic with your friends and family like these people are doing. So on Saturday afternoon Dan was at my house and I was like, "So, today is Mid-Autumn Festival. What do people do? Should be go out to dinner or something?" And he was like, "Well, they walk around the park carrying paper lanterns." And I was like "LET'S DO IT!" So we did.

Dan got a Doremon one. He's a famous Japanese manga character.

I opted for a more "traditional" choice, although the word traditional really is a stretch--we bought these lanterns for a dollar each and stuck 10 cent wax candles in them.

We went to the part near Dan's house and it was packed with people and lanterns. Dan took this beautiful picture out over the lake--look at all the lights! It was nighttime and all he had was my point and shoot, and cranking the ISO up makes everything very blurry, but he got a great shot. (All of mine were awful, so this is the last scenery shot you're going to get.) It was very beautiful though, with all the lights and the pond. The temperature was nice too...

I couldn't resist making Dan take a picture of me on a "traditional" Chinese bridge with a "traditional" Chinese lantern. Quality's not so good though.

Another thing people do is make candle designs. They bring several boxes of candles and camp out at a large rock or a park bench or whatever, and then they arrange the candles upright by sticking them to the surface using the melted wax of another candle. Then they light them all and it looks awesome!

A very creative and beautiful variant of the rock/park bench candles design! (These are the monkey bars of the playground in case you can't tell.)

I don't know how far back the tradition of burning up your lanterns at the end of the night goes--according to Dan, at least as far back as "When I was a kid we always burned up the lanterns after we were done with them"--but I'm glad it is a tradition. This is a pyromaniac's dream holiday! Look, the flame is BLUE!

So all in all, I highly recommend Mid-Autumn/Lantern Festival. I was in China a couple years ago for this same holiday, and I have to say that the Singaporeans do it better. Props!