What kind of emotions do the various customs of the Mid-Autumn Festival express?

The significance of the Mid-Autumn Festival is to celebrate family reunion, symbolizing the promotion of the Chinese culture of reunion, as well as the virtues of respecting the old, loving the young and being grateful to parents. The Mid-Autumn Festival originated from the worship of celestial phenomena and evolved from the ancient Qiu Xi Festival, an ancient ritual to the moon god.

1. The Mid-Autumn Festival was popularized in the Han Dynasty. It was officially recognized as a national festival in the Tang Dynasty. During the Northern Song Dynasty, the Mid-Autumn Festival had become a common folk festival. In the Ming and Qing Dynasties, the Mid-Autumn Festival was one of the major folk festivals. The Mid-Autumn Festival is a combination of seasonal customs of autumn. It not only means praying for a bountiful harvest, but also expresses people's feelings of missing their homes and relatives on the full moon.

2. The customs of the Mid-Autumn Festival have a long history, and the customs of the Mid-Autumn Festival are close to the needs of people's lives. Moon worship, moon viewing and reunion are the core of traditional Mid-Autumn Festival customs. From the perspective of contemporary social life, it still has the practical significance of meeting people's life needs.

3. Eating mooncakes on the Mid-Autumn Festival is an indispensable custom for celebrating the Mid-Autumn Festival all over China. It originated from Wu Zimu's Mengliang Lu of the Southern Song Dynasty. At that time, it was just a kind of leisure food. Later, people gradually combined moonlight viewing with mooncakes to symbolize family reunion and condolences. Meanwhile, mooncake is also an important gift for friends to get together on Mid-Autumn Festival.

4. Moon viewing originated from moon worship, and the serious rituals turned into light-hearted fun. Folk Mid-Autumn Moon Appreciation began in the Wei and Jin Dynasties, but it did not become a custom. In the Tang Dynasty, the moonlight appreciation and playing with the moon during the Mid-Autumn Festival were quite popular, and the famous poems of many poets contained poems about the moon. In the Song Dynasty, a mid-autumn folk festival centered on moon viewing activities was formed and officially designated as the Mid-Autumn Festival.

5. The custom of watching the tide at mid-autumn has a long history and was described in considerable detail as early as Meicheng's "Qimao Fu" in the Han Dynasty. After the Han Dynasty, the trend of watching the tide in mid-autumn became more prevalent. Tide watching was also recorded in Zhu Tinghuan's "Supplementary Records of Old Wulin Affairs" in the Ming Dynasty and Wu Zimu's "Mengliang Records" in the Song Dynasty.

The Mid-Autumn Festival is a traditional festival in China where families can get together, eat, drink and watch the moon with mooncakes. As a traditional festival inherited for thousands of years, the Mid-Autumn Festival has a special charm and power that make it traverse time, space and geography. Cultural inheritance and mutation also follow biological genealogy, just like the arrangement of biological genomes.