Chinese Spring Festival, Mid-Autumn Festival, the Dragon Boat Festival, and the Tomb Sweeping Festival are the four well-known Chinese traditional festivals by the Han people.
The specific dates of the four Chinese traditional festivals is based on the Chinese lunar calenda (traditional Chinese calendar) known as lunisolar, not the Gregorian calendar. The Mid-Autumn Festival is celebrated on the 15th day and the 8th month of the lunar calendar. The period of the Mid-Autumn Festival is from Sept. 15 to Oct. 15. The Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival was Sept. 15 last year while this year it is Oct. 4, 2017.
Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival first began as a harvest festival that everyone celebrated by getting together. As time went by, the festival was given fantastic fairy tales with legends of Chang E, who is a beautiful lady who drank an elixir stolen from her husband and then flew to the moon to live there.
The fairy tale took place several thousand years ago when there were ten suns that existed in the sky together, because of this the world was very hot and uncomfortable. An archer named Hou Yi shot down nine of the suns, leaving only one. People called him the saver of the world. Yi got the elixir of life from God. After someone eats the elixir they can be resurrected from the dead or live forever. He wanted to keep this elixir to save creatures and people like us. But his wife, Change E stole the elixir and ate it so she could live forever. God punished her to live in the moon so she would always be lonely.
The Mid-Autumn Festival, almost like Chinese Spring Festival and Christmas in America, is a time of family reunion. Most families have a feast dinner together to celebrate the festival. Another important part of the festival is that people like to eat mooncakes. A saying goes, “The moon in your hometown is almost always the brightest and roundest.” No matter how far away from home, people will go back home to be together with their families. It’s a family reunion, the brightest and roundest moon and a feast dinner with mooncakes, Could you imagine how happy it is?
