Mid-Autumn Festival

Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋节 Zhongqiu jie), also known as Moon Festival or Mooncake Festival, is one of the main national holidays here in China and throughout many Asian countries. It is celebrated on the full moon of the eighth lunar month of the year, so sometime in mid- to late-September.

While there are multiple stories as to the origins of this 3,000 year old holiday, the bottom line is that it is the time to gather and admire the harvest moon, in a way similar to Thanksgiving.

Families do travel to be together over this holiday, and we got a special treat this year by being invited by a classmate and her husband to join them and her parents who came from out-of-town to celebrate together.

It was a wonderful evening... as you can imagine the girls were a huge hit. Adayla continues to amaze and entertain us with her wit and her Chinese. She spent lots of time with Glenny and her parents, especially with Glenny's dad who loved this little foreign girl who could speak Chinese with him.

Here are a couple of pictures from the evening:

They prepared a feast, with various beef, pork, pig intestine, fish and vegetable dishes. They served these various dishes with a thin pancakes similar to a crepe, that we filled with the various dishes and ate with our hands. This is a Jiangsu province type dish. Glenny laughed when she described them as Chinese burritos (we had real burritos last week on an MBA class trip to Hong Kong that I still need to blog). It was mostly quite tasty!

The highlight of the meal was when they brought out the duck soup. You know chicken soup, right? That's something more of what I was expecting. Then they brought it out.... I didn't realize that duck soup would be a soup with an entire duck in it! Yup, here it is, head, beak, neck and everything. The duck was actually very good.

Mooncakes:

One of the traditional/popular parts of the festival is eating mooncakes. Here's a brief explanation of mooncakes, taken from wikipedia.com:

"Most mooncakes consist of a thin tender skin enveloping a sweet and slightly oily filling. The mooncake may contain one or more whole salted egg yolks in its center to symbolize the full moon. The saltiness of the yolk balances well with the sweet filling in the mooncake. Rarely, mooncakes are steamed or fried.

Traditional mooncakes have an imprint on top consisting of the Chinese characters for "longevity" or "harmony" as well as the name of the bakery and filling in the moon cake. Imprints of a moon, a woman on the moon, flowers, vines, or a rabbit may surround the characters for additional decoration.

Mooncakes are expensive and considered a delicacy, and production is labor-intensive and few people make them at home. Most mooncakes are bought at Asian markets and bakeries. The price of mooncakes range from $10 to $50 (in US dollars)."

I can't believe the price suggested in the description. I've seen a range of $.50 to $5 per mooncake here, and they typically are about 2-3 inches wide and an inch thick.

The funny part of the description above is that it must be written by somebody from China, as they think that mooncakes are somewhat sweet. They are hardly sweet by American standards. Popular "sweet" fillings include: lotus seed paste, sweet bean paste, sweet potato paste and jujube paste. The closest thing I can compare them to would be a giant Fig Newton, sometimes with a whole egg yolk inside (to symbolize the moon).

I would also compare mooncake to fruit cake, not in taste but in tradition. Why do people give fruit cakes for Christmas? Because its tradition... but why? Does anybody like eating fruit cake? The same thing can be said of mooncakes. Everybody here gives them to each other, but hardly anybody actually likes eating them ;-)

Here's a picture of a mooncake:

Unfortunately we haven't been able to see the moon during this year's Moon Festival -- the typhoon that has been hitting Taiwan has completely greyed out the skies here in Shanghai.

So since we can't put a picture of the Mid-Autumn Festival moon, here's a picture from last year...

See the moon at the top of the picture? BTW, the little boy who Morgan is holding is little Tally! It's been a year already?!