Mid-Autumn festival

The Mid-Autumn festival is the harvest festival celebrated notably by the Chinese and Vietnamese, but also by many other East Asian countries. Every year, this festival is held on the 15th of the eighth month of the lunar calendar, where the roundest and brightest moon appears in the sky.  Parades of celebration, lighting lanterns and dragon dances take place to honour this day. This year, the festival fell on 13 September.

The origins of this festival dates back 3000 years ago. The emperors worshipped the moon goddess for a plentiful harvest. Festivals began to grow in popularity only later in the Tang dynasty where moon gazing and praying became a common practice for the citizens. In the present day, Mid-Autumn is a major festival for family reunions and is akin to Christmas here in Australia. The day still touches on its origins - demonstrated in the ways it is celebrated.

Different ethnicities embed their own local cultural elements to their food and activities, which also expresses their own uniqueness. Most common themes in food and activities include eating moon cakes that symbolise the roundness of the full moon. They represent unity for the family reunion. Children make lanterns that are lit up and flown across the sky symbolising happiness, dreams and aspirations.

At MGSC this year, we celebrated Mid-Autumn together with our students remembering this day and its importance to people with family from these countries in our diverse cultural community. We made moon cakes, and had moon cake, soy bean milk and tea tasting on the day. Afterwards, students performed on traditional musical instruments with Amy Ma who played the Pipa, Anastasia Wang who played Chinese Flute and Cindy Han playing the Hulusi. At the Mid-Autumn assembly, Alice Xu, Hanwen Liu, Tammy Zhou, Sophie Xu, Zihan Sun also performed a traditional Chinese dance in traditional costume.

Thank you for all who took part in celebrating Mid-Autumn Festival!

Chan Le (Year 10)