Moon Cake Festival

Moon cake festival was a very important celebration during the earlier days especially when I was still a kid. There are a lot of fairy tales, myths or folklore stories told about this Mid-Autumn festival. My mum told me one of this, that was during the time around 1368 AD of the Yuan dynasty where China was conquered by the Mongolian, and the Ming dynasty founder emperor Chu organized his rebellion against the Mongolian regime by putting a piece of paper into the moon cake and informed all the Chinese to fight against them. And the date set on this particular day of rebellion was using this Mid-Autumn festival as a pretext for the attack. Since then, the moon cake tradition was passed on and even brought to Malaysia and south east Asia by the Chinese immigrants. Of course, there are many other versions on the origin of moon cake festival and nobody knows which is the most exact and true fact to trace the root of this particular tradition.

The mainland Chinese government had gazetted Chinese New Year, Qing Ming or Tomb sweeping festival, and Mid-Autumn moon cake festival as the 3 most important traditional holidays for Chinese as a whole. In Malaysia the Chinese do not observe moon cake festival in such a grand scale as before.

For this auspicious day, a full moon with clear sky in autumn signifies perfection, reunion, peace and harmony. Chinese from far away places would come home to meet up with their parents and friends, marking another day of reunion and celebration after the Chinese lunar new year passed about 8 months ago. Exchanging gifts and visiting were common in those days. We used to have pamelo, yam, water caltrops, water chestnut, ground nuts for the celebration. Those first 3 items were specially prepared just for the occasion besides moon cakes.

For the children, the "Tanglong" or lanterns are must have for the festival. My mum would always brought me and my siblings to the shops at least one or two weeks before the festival and picked for our lanterns. Lanterns come with all kinds of shapes, in the form of animals and other animated creatures. My favorites were always the dragon and "Kirin", and I chose on a few occasions the gold fish or fighting fish while my sisters preferred the rabbit, star, flower etc. We would gather ourselves as a group, holding the lighted lanterns and parading ourselves along the lanes and side roads of the village. It was really wonderful time we had, and I like it so much and remember it so well even until these days!

The tradition of having lanterns for celebration is a little different from China. As far as the mainland Chinese is concerned, the last day of the Chinese New Year celebration always goes with lanterns, and they hardly have any lanterns for the moon cake festival celebration. But in Malaysia, we will have lanterns only during moon cake festival. And I do not know why there is such difference!

Due to the distance and also we are having Friday off in Terengganu state, I did not go home to my family while I wrote this on the night of the Moon Cake Festival in the Homestay hotel in Cukai Kemaman.