A Mid-Autumn Moon Festival of Sorts

Last week was the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival and I went to Elina's class to tell the kids about the holiday. We don't normally celebrate it, but I tried to do a little more this year because Elina developed a taste for mooncakes and asked me questions about it. I bought Grace Lin's book, Thanking the Moon, and Elina thought the Moon Festival sounded pretty neat. (Grace Lin actually has written and illustrated a bunch of children's books about Chinese culture that are really great, so if you're interested you should check her out!) This holiday is the equivalent of the American Thanksgiving...a celebration of family and togetherness. It's on the night of a full moon, so people celebrate with things that are round--round lanterns, round food (like oranges or grapes), mooncakes. Normally families have a picnic at night where they thank the moon. We were actually going to try to do that here, but the weather wasn't cooperating (lots of rain), so we had to do it in the living room. We did it in conjunction with our Nature Night (where we eat breakfast for dinner while we watch a Planet Earth or BBC Life episode) and I did the best I could with round food. Actually, it was a poor attempt on my part, but the kids still thought it was awesome to have a picnic in the living room so they didn't really care too much. I just made some round pancakes and we made sure to have some oranges around. I didn't have too much round stuff in the house, but the kids still had fun and so did we!

It was fun sharing this holiday with Elina's classmates. Most of them were troopers and tried the mooncakes. Some even loved the taste! A lot of them had heard of this holiday from Kai-Lan (the Nick Jr. cartoon) so they couldn't wait to actually try real mooncakes. Elina was so excited to have me in class that she wanted to sit next to me in front of the class. She even showed off some of her Mandarin by teaching her friends how to say things like "older sister" and "younger sister." It was such a fun day!

We hope everyone else had a wonderful Moon Festival as well!