making meaning of mid-autumn festival

Mid-Autumn Festival, 中秋節 (zung1 cau1 zit3) or Harvest Moon Festival comes around annually, around August/September. On the Lunar Calendar, it falls on the 15th day of the 8th month - which happens to be Sept 10 on the Gregorian Calendar this year.

As with so many Chinese customs I’ve been learning about over this past year, 中秋節 came up on my radar thanks to the online Cantonese meetup group I joined last November. Seriously, that group has taught me so much about Chinese culture! I realized that I know very little about this holiday and wanted to think about how I might be able to meaningfully incorporate it in our family traditions.

I remember celebrating 中秋節 as a child, though my only memory was looking up at the ‘harvest moon’ - the largest full moon of the year - and eating mooncakes - which I did not enjoy! But I wanted to know more about the origins or folklore around the holiday and here is what I’ve gathered from my research:

• It is a celebration of family reunion/gathering

• It is celebrated by eating mooncakes, anything round that can symbolize the moon and family unity, and a lot of fresh seasonal fruit, which in the Asian countries that celebrate this festival would be pomelo, starfruit, taro, pear

• Folklore tells of a gentle, kind-hearted woman named 嫦娥 (seung4 ngo4) (pronounced Chang'e in Mandarin, in case you watched the video) that lives on the moon and 中秋節 is to honour her. One way to do that is to look up and appreciate the moon

• Mooncakes are very dense cakes that have a thin crust and a heavy filling. There are many varieties but the most common is lotus seed paste with a salted duck yolk in the middle (note that both lotus seeds and egg yolks are round in shape)

• It is a public holiday in some parts of Asia and there are public events including lantern lighting and dragon dances

• Next to Lunar New Year, 中秋節 is the second biggest holiday in China & Hong Kong

It is an odd feeling to take a holiday that means very little to me, and look for meaning in it. It brings to mind philosophical questions I’ve been pondering for the past few years: Why do we keep traditions alive? For children (or grandchildren or great-grandchildren, etc.) of immigrants, for whom these traditions from the “home country” do not resonate, is there any point carrying them forward? Is it inauthentic for someone like me (1st-gen Canadian) to celebrate 中秋節 meaningfully? What about for future generations like my son and daughter?

I liken this to the idea of someone attempting to celebrate Christmas after reading about it and learning a few facts about it. They might read that they should get a tree to decorate, or to cook a turkey on Dec 25, or exchange gifts, though they’ve never experienced these events personally or seen them represented anywhere. Would that be an authentic celebration of Christmas, or might it ring hollow? Living in a society that celebrates Christmas basically en masse, we have societal structures in place such as a Santa parade, tree lighting ceremonies, Christmas lights all over the city or in parks that really enhance the experience of the holiday, not to mention the commercial barrage to our senses that begins the minute Halloween ends. It is also a (mostly) shared experience, as most of the people around us observe Christmas, even if in a non-religious capacity.

a book explaining customs and stories behind Chinese holidays - my main source of information on

中秋節... hopefully it is a realiable source!

In this way, I feel like I’m reading all about 中秋節 and feeling foreign to some of the concepts - sort of like this holiday isn’t “mine” to celebrate, and that I don’t know “how to celebrate” this holiday. On the other hand, it is also empowering to get to decide for myself what kind of meaning I’d like to attribute to this holiday, and that it will likely be a mix of my Chinese and Canadian cultures. I'm sure most "traditions" feel strange when you're doing it for the first time on your own; I suppose it is just a rite of passage of adulthood, and it will feel more "natural" once you do it two or three times. This will be our first year celebrating 中秋節 and it's fun that we can decide together as a family on what kind of traditions we’d like to incorporate. I’ll be sure to post about what we end up doing!