Mid-Autumn Festival Traditional Customs

The Mid-Autumn Festival, also known as the Moon Festival, the Autumn Festival, the Mid-Autumn Festival, the August Festival, the August Meeting, the Moon Chasing Festival, the Moon Playing Festival, the Moon Worshiping Festival, the Daughter's Festival, or the Festival of Reunion, is a traditional cultural festival that is popular among the many ethnic groups of China and the countries of the Chinese Character and Culture Circle, which is held on the fifteenth day of the eighth month of the lunar calendar; the name is given to it because it falls at the halfway point of the three autumns and is set in the sixteenth month of the eighth year in some places. So let's take a look at those Mid-Autumn Festival customs?

Mid-Autumn Festival customs:

?1, eat osmanthus cake?

There are many reasons to eat osmanthus cake on Mid-Autumn Festival. The first and very important reason is that most of the Mid-Autumn Festival is in the tenth month of the lunar calendar, and the tenth month is the fragrance of osmanthus, this time the osmanthus aroma is strong, it is very suitable to be used to make sweet, soft and sticky osmanthus cake, and some people will also be brewing some osmanthus wine, with a unique osmanthus aroma.

Secondly, when the osmanthus blossoms are in full bloom, it is also the time of autumn harvest, when people like to pick some osmanthus blossoms to make pastries, and taste osmanthus cakes to express their gratitude to the autumn, thank for the harvest in autumn, and share the joy and beauty of the harvest. Moreover, the petals of osmanthus flowers are very compact and elegant in shape, which means harvest and beauty, so eating osmanthus cakes on Mid-Autumn Festival also symbolizes the pursuit of a better life.

Overall, there are two reasons to eat osmanthus cake at Mid-Autumn Festival, one is that the osmanthus flower aroma is in full bloom at this time, which makes osmanthus cake taste good; the second is that osmanthus flower symbolizes harvest and good, so people will eat osmanthus cake at this time to express the pursuit of the heart.

On the occasion of the Mid-Autumn Festival, every family will put a Kongming lantern, in which friends will hand-write blessings on the wish, symbolizing the success of the coming year's harvest and happiness year after year.

The Kongming lanterns are also called sky lanterns, commonly known as wishing lanterns, also known as praying lanterns. It is an ancient Chinese handicraft, mostly used for military purposes in ancient times. Modern people put the Kongming lanterns mostly as a prayer for blessings. Men, women and children write down their wishes with their own hands to symbolize a good harvest and success, and happiness year after year. Generally in the Lantern Festival, Mid-Autumn Festival and other major festivals cast.

China's people in ancient times, there is "autumn sunset" custom. The moon, that is, to worship the moon god. By the Zhou Dynasty, every mid-autumn night to welcome the cold and moon festival. A large incense burner was set up, and mooncakes, watermelons, apples, jujubes, plums, grapes and other offerings were placed on the table, of which mooncakes and watermelons were absolutely indispensable. The watermelon should also be cut in the shape of a lotus flower. Under the moon, the statue of the moon god is placed in the direction of the moon, red candles are lit high, the whole family worships the moon in turn, and then the housewife in charge cuts the mooncakes for reunion. The person who cuts it counts in advance how many people in the whole family ****, at home, in the field, should be counted together, can not cut more or less, the size should be the same.

Mid-Autumn Festival to eat moon cakes, and the Dragon Boat Festival to eat dumplings, Lantern Festival to eat dumplings, as is the traditional folk custom in China. It is said that the period of the Tang Dynasty has been the custom of eating mooncakes at mid-autumn, but mooncakes as a food name and associated with the mid-autumn moon viewing, is the Song Dynasty. The Northern Song royal mid-autumn festival like to eat a kind of "palace cake", folk commonly known as "small cake", Su Dongpo has a poem: "small cake such as chewing the moon, there are crispy and syrup." Zhou Mi, a writer of the Southern Song Dynasty, first mentioned the name "mooncake" in "Old Story of Wulin". Legend has it that at the end of the Yuan Dynasty, people also used mooncakes to convey anti-Yuan messages, indicating that mooncakes had already entered the homes of ordinary people and become a necessary food for the Mid-Autumn Festival. For a long time, our people have accumulated rich experience in making mooncakes, and during the Ming and Qing Dynasties, bakers had already printed mythological stories such as Chang'e Running to the Moon on mooncakes as food art patterns. A Qing Dynasty literati described: "mooncake full of peach meat filling, ice cream sweet laying cane sugar frosting", seems to be quite similar to the current mooncake. In modern times, there are workshops specializing in the production of mooncakes, mooncake production is more delicate, filling sophisticated, beautiful appearance, but also divided into different flavors such as flat, Suzhou, Canton, Taiwan and so on. As a symbol of good luck and reunion, mooncakes hold people's good wishes, and the custom of eating mooncakes and giving mooncakes continues to this day.

China since ancient times, there is the custom of sacrificing and enjoying the moon. During the Zhou Dynasty, every Mid-Autumn Night was held to welcome the cold and moon worship activities. The custom of enjoying the moon at mid-autumn was very popular in the Tang Dynasty, and many poets had poems about the moon in their famous poems. To the Song Dynasty, the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival style is more prevalent, every day, "the noble family decorative platforms and pavilions, the folk compete to occupy the restaurant to play the moon. Ming and Qing court and folk moon worship and moon viewing activities on a larger scale, China has survived many "moon worship altar", "moon worship pavilion", "moon building" and other monuments. Scholarly men and women to enjoy the moon is a favorite, they or climbed to the moon or canoeing to invite the moon, drinking and poetry, leaving a lot of popular songs of the past. For example, Du Fu "August 15 night moon" symbolizes the reunion of the fifteenth moon to reflect their own wandering in a foreign land of the sadness of the detainees; Song Dynasty literary hero Su Shi, Mid-Autumn Festival drinking Dan, drunkenness, and made the "Song of Water", by the moon's roundness of the metaphor of the separation of the human being. Until today, the family sits together to enjoy the beauty of the moon in the sky is still one of the essential activities of the Mid-Autumn Festival.