Mid Autumn Festival at My Childhood Church
Ever since before I could remember, my family and I went to church every Sunday at our Chinese Catholic church called Mission of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. As a child, I looked forward to the celebrations that we had at our church for both Christian and Chinese holidays. One of my favorites was Mid Autumn Festival. At the festival, all of us kids would perform Chinese songs and dances. We would also do fun crafts, play games, and eat LOTS of amazing food.
After Mr. Jo and I moved back to Plano, we started attending my childhood church again. A few of the girls I grew up with and I are active volunteers at my church, so we get together and plan fun stuff for our kids to do at our church functions.
This year, Mid Autumn Festival fell on Monday, September 24th, so our church had a celebration this past weekend. The events coordinator at our church asked me to come up with some fun activities for the children to do. Last week, Jo Jr., Missy Jo and I tested some ideas. We came up with some fun activities and everyone had a great time at the festival.
What is Mid Autumn Festival?
What is Mid Autumn Festival anyway, you ask? Honestly, I didn’t really know, so I asked my parents and consulted Google. The holiday always falls on the 15th day of the 8th month of the lunar calendar, which is usually sometime in late September or early October in the Gregorian calendar. According to my dad, Mid Autumn Festival is a time for family reunion, thanksgiving, and celebrating children.
The full moon is meaningful for several reasons.
- If someone can’t make it back home to their family, they can look at the full moon and think of their loved ones.
- Some people say that the full moon represents a pregnant woman and the sun is the man. Once the moon becomes a crescent again, the moon is thought to have given birth to children, represented by the stars.
- In Ancient China, people worshiped and thanked the moon for that year’s harvest as well as a woman’s fertility, which is how Mid Autumn Festival started.
- According to legend, moon cakes were used by the Han Chinese to overthrow the Mongols at the end of the Yuan Dynasty. On the night of the fullest moon, the rebels delivered messages to each other inside of moon cakes to coordinate their uprising.
Mid Autumn Festival Crafts
Moon Cake Cookies
Growing up, we always purchased our moon cakes from Chinese bakeries for Mid Autumn Festival. My favorites are the ones with red bean or mung bean filling and a salted egg yolk. If you have never had it before, the egg yolk may sound strange. However, it is the perfect salty balance to a sweet and delicious dessert.
Instead of making actual moon cakes, I decided to make moon cake cookies with Jo Jr.. If you want to save time like me, use the Betty Crocker sugar cookie mix and follow the instructions for the cutout cookies. I used regular square and circle cookie cutters. After setting the cutouts on my cookie sheet, I pressed the molds into the dough. Amazon has these really easy to use and pretty inexpensive moon cake molds that work great for cookies too. After a few tries, I found that the thinner cookies held the design a little bit better.
For the Mid Autumn Festival at our church, I brought a bunch of Betty Crocker cookie icing, edible food color spray, sprinkles, mini chocolate chips, etc. The kids decorated their own cookies and had a blast. We even got some of the older, too cool for school, kids to join in! I mean come on, everyone loves cookies.
Mid Autumn Festival Lantern
Since Mid Autumn Festival is celebrated at night when we can fully appreciate the beauty of the full moon, people take lanterns out at night to moon gaze with their families. For another fun activity, try making a lantern out of construction paper. Here are the items you will need:
The circle and star hole punches are for a little extra flare, but you can omit these if you don’t have them on hand. Look below for how Jo Jr. and I made his.
Moon Ornaments
For this mommy, there is nothing better than an ornament made by the little hands of my little rugrats. I save them all and hang them up on our Christmas tree each year. I know I’ll look back at the ornaments one day and reminisce about how little my children once were. Now that I have you all teary eyed, why not have your kiddos make their own Mid Autumn Festival moon ornament?
For supplies, you need 3 inch diameter wood circles, tacky glue, buttons, glitter, ribbon, and a drill. First, I drilled a hole about 1 cm from the edge of the circle. Then, I fed a piece of ribbon through the hole and tied it. As an alternative, you could use a heavy duty stapler to staple on the ribbon. Third, I had the kids help squeeze tacky glue onto the wood circle. After that, they went to town putting the buttons onto the glue. I didn’t realize this before, but this is a great activity for working on fine motor skills!
To add a little more sparkle, we put more glue around the buttons and applied glitter. If you don’t want to deal with the messiness of glitter, use glitter glue instead!
My kids had the best time making all of these Mid Autumn Festival crafts. Hopefully, you’re kids will have just as much fun while learning about the second most important Chinese holiday (behind Chinese New Year, of course)!
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