The Chinese lunar calendar calls for a full moon onSep. The day just doesn’t always correspond to the more widely used Gregorian calendar. But on the Chinese lunar calendar, it’s always on the 15th day of the 8th moon. The Mid-Autumn Festival comes a little earlier this year - on Sep. Sometimes known as the Mooncake or simply, Moon Festival, the Mid-Autumn Festival is the second-largest celebration in the Chinese culture, behind only Chinese New Year. 13, offerings of mooncakes and fresh fruit will be made under the night sky to Chang’e. When the Chinese community celebrates the Mid-Autumn Festival on Sep. According to Chinese legend, the beautiful and divine lady Chang’e (pronounced chung-er), dwells on the moon, forever pining for her beloved husband on Earth. "The US Postal Service hasn't found a way to destroy them.Instead of looking for the man in the moon, try looking for the lady the next time the moon is full. "There is only one fruitcake in the entire world, and people keep sending it to each other, year after year."Īnd as another joke about fruitcakes goes, why do they make a perfect gift?
#GAZING AT THE MOON MIDAUTUMN FESTIVAL CRACKED#
"The worst Christmas gift is fruitcake," cracked comic Johnny Carson. Most Americans don't give mooncakes to one another, but they do have a cake that has become synonymous with Christmas: fruitcakes. The giving of a lardy disc-shaped pastry is part of that. Whether in Beijing or New York, most people who celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival treat it as a holiday similar to America's Thanksgiving - a time to get together with family and friends without the pressures of major (and more expensive) holidays. And just like in Beijing, poetry and moon-gazing are unpopular in the Big Apple.
It looks like Chinese culture can be preserved, while adapting to changing circumstances. They're buying mooncakes - still wrapped in those flashy packages, too. Nevertheless, I've been surprised at the ways the festival continues in at least the city's heavily Chinese neighborhoods.įor weeks before Mid-Autumn Festival, Brooklyn's Chinatown, where I live, looks a little like Beijing with people running in and out of Chinese bakeries, or standing in line at Chinese grocery stores. When years later I moved back to New York City, I didn't expect to find any public celebration of the Mid-Autumn Festival. Today, people choose to focus on the party part over the historical aspect. But it loses emphasis amid holiday snacks and festivities.
The original, grim meaning of the Duanwu Festival a commemoration of the death by suicide of poet Qu Yuan is known to all. Just like eating mooncakes, gazing at the moon and reading poetry aren't too popular.īut for comparison, a similar thing happened to the springtime Duanwu Festival, popularly known as the Zongzi Festival for the holiday snack zongzi. To them, it wasn't the traditional celebration of the autumn harvest, accompanied by moon-viewing and poetry recitation. Some of my friends even jokingly called it the Mooncake Festival. Most chose instead to exchange them as gifts at raucous dinners with family, friends or co-workers. The taste didn't fit with today's demands - too fatty, too sweet. I asked my friends about mooncakes, and they said that few people actually ate them. Every grocery store seemed to have lines full of people carrying that single item to the register, wrapped in ostentatious, gaudy boxes. When Mid-Autumn Festival came around, the city was abuzz with commercial activity, in particular shopping for mooncakes.
I learned about this hockey-puck sized pastry with its lard-based crust and dense, sugary interior when I moved from a quiet village in semirural Changping, about an hour's drive north of Beijing, to the capital city. It's about time off from work, and the gift that few seem to eat but keep giving to one another: mooncakes. Mid-Autumn Festival in China has nothing, or at least very little, to do with autumn.
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