Among all the holidays, Chinese and Western alike, Mid-Autumn Festival is my favorite. Mid-Autumn Festival is a popular holiday in China. It falls on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month in Chinese calendar, usually around mid or late September in the Gregorian calendar. Each year the festival is celebrated on a different date. In 2009, it was celebrated on October 3rd. Mid-Autumn Festival is an important traditional holiday in China, as important to Chinese people as Thanksgiving is to American people. We do our best to reunite with our families on this day. Instead of eating turkey and pumpkin pie, we eat moon cakes. Instead of eating vegetables and cranberry sauce, we eat nuts, Asian pears, grapes, and, best of all, we have some delicious steamed crabs and wash them all down with warm yellow wine. The celebration can be held outdoors. We sometimes set the dinner table at the backyard under the moonlight. We watch the full moon while we eat and drink. Afterwards, adults sit in their backyards, as the children play under the moonlight, with lanterns in their hands. In some part of China, people set various festival lanterns floating on rivers. The Moon bonds us together even though we are half a globe apart from our hometown and relatives. We miss them as they miss us when we look up to the Moon. But by basking in the same moonlight we know are virtually together.
