Mid-Autumn Festivities

The word festival is always a delightful one to hear but here in Hong Kong it always seems to have more significance. The word comes from the word or feast, meaning some type of gluttony is officially encouraged, just as the same way carnival comes from the Latin word for meat. A celebration where lots of meat is eaten. At the moment it is Mid-autumn festival where the order of the day seems to be mooncakes. They are mad on mooncakes. Months before the festival there are displays in the supermarkets and women dressed in a traditional costume selling their brand of mooncakes. It’s very much like out lead-in to Christmas, and they have that too. Or Easter, and they get that one too.

Mooncakes are pastries which have a sweet crust and filled with lotus seed paste and have a salted hen’s or duck’s egg in the centre. They are very rich and delicious. The idea is the egg is supposed to resemble the full moon.

The mid-autumn festival celebrates the harvest and is timed with the full moon, usually in early October or late August, depending on the phases of the moon. As with most important festivals here it is a public holiday, although this year it fell on a Saturday. Thursday was a holiday for National Day and if we were in Mainland China we’d get a week off, called the Golden Week. No worries, we’ll get a long weekend in a couple of weeks for Tomb Sweeping day when people go and tend the tombs and pay respects to their ancestors.

So along with eating traditional mooncakes and new types, like the ‘Snowy’ (covered in white icing and with a huge range of very sweet fillings, intended to be eaten cold or frozen) people will come out late at night to view the full moon and turn on their lanterns. Kids have all different types from cartoon characters to butterflies and they stay out really late. They used to have traditionally candle-lit lanterns but some kids used to make little bonfires of them leaving piles of wax and soot for the council to clean up, so they just simply banned them. Now they have to have battery operated ones—think it’s a conspiracy from the battery makers personally.
Poppy thoroughly enjoyed her Mid-Autumn Festival with her cousins, staying up late and getting to eat ice-cream in the warm evening under the glow of a full moon and thousands of coloured lights.