![]() At night, we would show off our lanterns, chase around, and sing popular Viet songs about the moon goddess and moon boy. My first lantern was a little, very beautiful candle-lit butterfly. In the evening when the moon was just high, parents would ask us to come home to worship our ancestors with mooncakes, fruit, tea, and wine. We would share the toys and play some war games during the mid-autumn day. Days before the festival, my neighbor kids and I used to make tons of paper-based elephants, horses, and unicorns. I celebrated my first Moon Festival when I was four. I hope you enjoy learning about the moon festival and traditions in Japan and I would love to learn about the moon festival in your cultures too! I remember that I made Tsukimi dango on the fifteenth moon day to celebrate the beautiful moon when I was in kindergarten and learned how we celebrate and appreciate the beautiful moon and fall seasons in Japanese tradition. Therefore, we believe that rabbits are living on the moon. In my culture, we believe that there are rabbits on the moon because, on Tsukimi day, we can see the rabbit shape on the surface of the full moon. On Tsukimi day, we have traditions to put Tsukimi dango besides the window with Susuki (a specific plant we put with Tsukimi dango in my culture). We see the full moon and eat Tsukimi dango (circle shape mochi) on the fifteenth day and eight months on the traditional Japanese calendar to appreciate the beautiful moon in the fall. We call the event which is watching the full moon in the middle of fall “Tsukimi” (月見). Today, I would like to introduce the moon festival and cultures in Japan. Hello, this is Haruka and I am an international student from Japan. Photo Credit: Zane Lam Tzyy Sin | Wikimedia Commons | License details The moon festival has changed to about family connection instead of moon-worshiping anymore! You can hear the same TV sound coming out of every window, and we are doing the same thing together. Everyone celebrates the moon festival together, and at that time, it feels like every single family is connected through the small TV. And it’s great to see if the boxes contain my favorite flavor, otherwise, I will only eat the few boxes I bought myself.īesides those, watching the special festival TV show on national television is great. At the same time, our family will get a couple of huge boxes of mooncakes. The mooncake exchange is the most exciting part, similar to the Christmas gift exchange in western culture, we will meet with friends, other distant families and give them the mooncakes as a standard gift. My whole family will go mooncakes shopping together and each person will choose 2-3 different flavors they like as well as some gift sets for friends or other families. The mooncake from my family had to be purchased from China’s time-honored brand (more than centuries history). The mooncake is the most important piece of the jigsaw puzzle of the festival. ![]() It used to be a festival that had mooncake outdoors with poetries and tea, and it started to gradually change to indoor within the decade. Having one day off without going to school, eating mooncakes while watching the festival special TV show with my family, and competing with my friends on social media to compare who got the roundest moon picture. ![]() The mid-autumn festival had always been my favorite festival as a child. The roundest circle means flawless, and it contains the greatest wish people have for the family reunion with everyone. The importance of the festival is about the reunion and the reason the date was chosen is because the ancients think the moon is the roundest on that day in the lunar calendar. A mid-autumn festival in a sense is very similar to the format of Christmas, a reunion of the family with the present (mooncakes) exchanging. It is not only a moon appreciation festival and eating mooncake, instead, it has also been becoming a significant social event within recent centuries. The mid-autumn festival is one of the three most important days in a year along with the spring festival and dragon boat festival in China.
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