Mid-Autumn Festival （中秋节; Zhongqiu Jie) is one of my favorite holidays in China. I like it partly because it reminds me of Thanksgiving which is one of my favorite American holidays. The other day, I was talking with some of my students about the similarities between these holidays. We agreed that one of the highlights of both of these holidays is eating a big meal with your family. Of course, the contents of the meal are completely different, but I love that concept of being with family and enjoying good fellowship together.
For American Thanksgiving, the most important food is turkey (in my opinion). For the Mid-Autumn Festival, mooncakes （月饼; yuebing) are the most important food. I love talking with my students about what kind of mooncakes they like. Mooncakes are a small (or large) dense pastry with some kind of filling in the middle.
Many students tell me that they don’t really love mooncakes. Most of them are too sweet. But some of the popular ones that I have heard about are the ice cream-filled mooncakes. I’ve never had one of these because they’re a bit expensive, but I’ve heard they’re quite good! Another favorite is an egg-yolk filling. I have never been a huge fan of the egg yokes. I really like the lotus paste that is often around the egg yokes in the middle, but the egg yokes are not my favorite.
I enjoy the black sesame filled-mooncakes or sometimes the nutty ones are tasty. Most mooncakes are a bit too large to enjoy the whole thing by myself because they are dense and quite heavy, but I enjoy cutting them up and sharing them with friends.
Other flavors include beef, and my neighbors gave my roommate and me some that have red bean-filled mooncakes and various tea-flavored fillings (like oolong). I haven’t been brave enough to try those because I don’t know how caffeinated they are, but they sound good.
Also, these mooncakes that our neighbors gave us are quite beautiful! I took some pictures to share with you.
Usually my school gives me mooncakes also as a gift for the holiday. Most of them have the egg yokes, and I ate one this year. Kendra performed surgery to remove the egg yoke, and then we enjoyed the rest of it. I usually get more mooncakes from kind-hearted people than I can finish myself, but I have a couple of friends who really love mooncakes, so I usually give some of them away also.
For this Mid-Autumn Festival, I had pizza with some good friends. Pizza is absolutely not a traditional food for this holiday, but it’s an easy food to order, and we enjoyed it.
Another tradition for this holiday is to look at the moon! Since the holiday is based on the lunar calendar, it’s a full moon, and it is often considered one of the biggest moons. My friend’s house was facing the wrong direction, but we went up to the roof and had a great view of the moon!
I took a picture of the moon far away and the moon comes out as a shiny object, but when I zoomed in, I was amazed at the detail I could see in the image. But I was skeptical. I’d heard that some phones, when taking pictures of the moon, will replace the image with another image from online. I don’t know if that’s what happened to my picture (probably so), but it’s still a very nice view of the moon.
We didn’t have a big party, but I was thankful for this time to spend with my wonderful friends and their family!
