By Lishan Sung – NUREN Advisory Board
This year the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival 中秋节 (zhōngqiū jié), also known as the Moon Festival fell on 17 September 2024. It is held on the fifteenth day of the eighth month of the Chinese lunisolar calendar. The eighth lunar month is the middle of autumn and according to the Chinese calendar this is when the moon is at its brightest and biggest.
A joyous occasion for families to come together, eat, worship the moon, and celebrate the fall harvest. Those celebrating enjoy a delicious family dinner followed with mooncakes for desert. The most well-known kind of mooncake is made of lotus seed paste with salted egg yolk inside. Nuts, red beans, custards are some other popular ingredients. A cold version is snow skin mooncakes (similar to mochi ice cream). For the children we light colourful lanterns, hang them outside and appreciate the bright full moon. Chinese supermarkets are quite well stocked with different varieties of moon cake.
Ambitious, creative people (like my sister-in-law) make mooncakes from scratch! I can’t wait to try.
