Mid Autumn Festival 2008

Mid Autumn Festival is celebrated by Chinese everywhere. In China, it is also a public holiday. It falls on the 15th day of the 8th Lunar Month (which means that if one follows the Gregorian calendar, it kinda move around). This year, the festival falls on 14th Sept 2008. For the sake of convenience, most people celebrated the day on Saturday (13th), because if one were to celebrate it on 14th, you would have to wrap up earlier as the following day is a working day.

For me, this year's celebration was on a very much smaller scale. Only 7th Aunt, Wendy and my brother Danny Kit were invited for dinner. Everyone else has their own families and dinners to attend to. Mum prepared steamed chicken, roast pork , soup (made from dried vegetables - not preserved vegetables) and a vegetable dish of sweet peas, mushrooms, bean curd and other stuff. She had also bought 6 crabs from the market earlier in the morning. So I had to abandon any thoughts of starting on the electrical works in my Denai Alam house as I was expected to prepare the crabs and serve up black pepper crabs. Sorry - no photos taken. Busy day.

After our dinner, My wife, Alex and I dropped Danny back in the center of town - he had his own activities for a Saturday night. And we skedaddled to Vincent's parents house. Alex had wanted to light up lanterns with Madeline. She had agreed and also told us that BBQ would be available!!. By the way, Mid Autumn festival is also known as Lantern festival or mooncake festival. The festival has a story behind it. See here for the details.

We started the night with Alex, Madeline and my wife preparing the lanterns. Once those were up, the BBQ pit was fired up. Took quite a while to get that fired up - and Vincent's dad did all the work. I think I ate too much for dinner. I was feeling lethargic throughout the night (lazy lah!!). There were 2 dogs in the compound - both are NOT friendly to strangers. But Rocky was the fiercer one. Everytime Alex made sudden movements - he would growled and bark at him, I had to remind Alex to walk and talk normally and not act hyper as he is apt to do sometimes.

One thing we learn very fast was that paper lanterns burns and they burn very fast. throughout the night, lanterns just went up in flames in a very sudden manner. So much so, I was waiting with my camera - ready to take a shot of a burning lantern. No such luck.

The nearest I got was seeing smoke from a couple of the lanterns. Took some shots and then the smoke fizzled out. Still, as you can see, the bottom of the lanterns have been burnt. We must have lost at least 5 lanterns that night.

Luckily we celebrated on 13th. Tonight is the 14th as I make this entry and it has been raining since 5pm!!