Mid-Autumn Festival

We are getting ready for the Mid- Autumn Festival in the Benefield household! Hoyer had a lantern that lasted 5 seconds and we all enjoyed reading about and tasting the traditional food of the Mid-Autumn Festival, the Mooncake! We will celebrate with friends at our beach and watch the moon rise in all its fullness while the kids play and adults drink and eat. Sounds like my kind of holiday. All business have Thursday off...including KPMG, so we are thrilled to have an extra family day thrown the mix!

A quick Google search revealed the following about the festival:

The Mid-Autumn Festival is held on the 15th day of the eighth month in the Chinese calendar, which is usually around late September or early October in the Gregorian calendar. It is a date that parallels the autumnal equinox of the solar calendar, when the moon is supposedly at its fullest and roundest. The traditional food of this festival is the mooncake, of which there are many different varieties.
The Mid-Autumn Festival is one of the few most important holidays in the Chinese calendar, the others being Chinese New Year and Winter Solstice, and is a legal holiday in several countries. Farmers celebrate the end of the summer harvesting season on this date. Traditionally on this day, Chinese family members and friends will gather to admire the bright mid-autumn harvest moon, and eat moon cakes and pomelos under the moon together. Accompanying the celebration, there are additional cultural or regional customs, such as:

• Putting pomelo rinds on one's head
• Carrying brightly lit lanterns, lighting lanterns on towers, floating sky lanterns
• Burning incense in reverence to deities including Chang'e (Chinese: 嫦娥; pinyin: Cháng'é)
• Planting Mid-Autumn trees
• Collecting dandelion leaves and distributing them evenly among family members
• Fire Dragon Dances
• In Taiwan, since the 1980s, barbecuing meat outdoors has become a widespread way to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival.^[2][3]

Shops selling mooncakes before the festival often display pictures of Chang'e floating to the moon.