My Favorite Chinese Festival

There are a lot of Chinese festivals in China and we do a lot of specific festivals for each festival. Chinese New Year, lantern festival, Qing Ming festival, dragon boat festival, mid-autumn festival, and Chong Yang festival are all festivals in China. Chinese New Year is the main festival in China, everybody celebrates it and there are no exceptions. Mid-Autumn festival is also one of the popular ones because that is the one where your whole family gathers together, like Chinese New Year, your family gathers together and you eat mooncake. There is one very special point about Chinese festivals as every festival you have a special kind of food to eat. This is also the part most people do not want to miss because Chinese people like to eat. Chinese festivals are all very important because that is what makes history and celebrates the legends. 

There is a specific food that we eat in each festival and I am going to talk about the Mid-Autumn Festival. As the name suggests, the food is called the mooncake. We eat mooncakes when it is night and you see the big round moon in the sky. There are even different types of mooncakes. There is the type we ate a long time ago where it was a very big cake and we cut them into equal pieces. There are also small mooncakes that everyone can take one and eat at the same time. Mooncakes also have different flavors. Some are sweet and some are salty. The salty ones usually have a crunchy outer layer and the sweet ones are usually soft and from the outside if you look at it it is orange-gold. Mooncakes are a very popular thing, especially during the Mooncake Festival and we can even eat them if it is not the festival. 

There are also special activities for the Mid-Autumn Festival. During the Mid-Autumn Festival there are family reunions where your cousins or your closer family members from another city come to your house or you go to their house and you visit them. The host of the reunion usually asks us to go up to the balcony or sit in a spot where you can look outside, maybe with a big window. We do this because then everybody can see the moon. Also, in the name of the festival it says “moon” so it makes sense to see the moon. We look at the moon for a while and think about the great legend. It is at these reunions that we eat mooncakes together. The reunion is a very big part of the festival and if your family is in another country you can just look at the moon and think of them. 

The legend of the Mid-Autumn Festival is very important because that is what started the festival. In the legend, there was a person farming and he had a very special kind of medicine he hid in his house. But one day there was a thief who tried to steal the medicine when his wife was home alone. Then, his wife thought rather than giving it to someone evil, why don’t I use it and my husband will understand. After she swallowed the medicine she started to float. She floated and floated, when her husband got back he saw the thief just staring at the sky and his wife floating. The husband took a knife and tried to kill the thief, but the thief was quick and ran away. And then, he looked at his wife and tried to pull her down, but it was too high for him. He tried to lift on his toes, but he still could not get her and she floated away. The wife floated to the moon and met a rabbit there. The rabbit liked her and she stayed on the moon. This legend is why we celebrate the moon and look at it during the Mooncake Festival since that day in the legend it was a full moon. 

Mid-Autumn Festival is very popular and we have very specific things we do during it, unlike Chinese New Year. In each Chinese festival there is a special food to eat, except Chinese New Year where there is lots of food to eat. Some festivals are very fun, but others might be sad, like the Qing Ming festival. It is a very sad festival because you have to go to your grandparents' tombs or somebody that died who was closer to you and sweep the tombs. Festivals are a very big thing in China because they are an important part of history.