CSX wishes all a Happy Mid-Autumn Festival 2023
A glorious festival of lanterns, moon cakes and glutinous rice balls!
The Mid-Autumn Festival or popularly known as ‘Mooncake Festival’ is celebrated throughout all Chinese communities during the harvest break of the autumn season within the traditional lunar calendar. On this auspicious occasion, families, friends, and acquaintances gather to enjoy delectable mooncakes and parade delightful lanterns under the starry moonlight. It is a festive celebration of camaraderie and warmth that fosters closer ties and strengthens relationships as well as bringing joy, abundance, prosperity, and happiness to everyone. This year, Malaysians celebrate the mid-Autumn festivities on 29th September with family reunions, moon cakes, and lantern parades.
The Majestic Mooncake
The annual Mid-Autumn Festival falls on the 15th day of the eighth moon in the Chinese Lunar Calendar, and is widely celebrated by Chinese communities all over the world to mark the end of the mid-Autumn harvest season. As it is commonly associated with paper lanterns, it is also known as the Lantern (or “Tang Lung”) Festival. Mooncakes are generally gifted to friends and relatives to foster closer ties. This festival is believed to have originated from the ancient ceremony of ‘Sacrifice to the Moon Goddess’ for the year's end harvest – thus the name “moon cake” from which it is derived.
Sweet Delectable Offerings
During reunions, family folks often return home to celebrate and give thanks for the year's abundant bounty. Fruit offerings such as apples, oranges, melons, pears, peaches, pomelos, and pomegranates are common in many Chinese families and households. Other offerings include a variety of mooncakes such as yam, taro, red bean, and black water chestnuts. Not forgetting, of course, the “tang yuan” or sticky glutinous rice balls that come in a vivid array of bright rainbow colours that resemble edible marbles. Children just love to eat them!
An Auspicious Festivity
On the 15th night when the moon shines the brightest, generous offerings of mooncakes, fried chicken, roasted piglet, barbecued pork, yam cakes, watermelon seeds and herbal teas are offered to deities and ancestors on the praying altar. Lighted lanterns are often portrayed in front of homes. Holy prayers are then offered with the customary burning of red candles, incensed sticks, and scented joss-paper. After prayers, there is feasting and merry-making as children carry paper lanterns of all shapes and sizes to parade them around neighbourhoods. Most Chinese temples in major cities also organize lantern processions as well as flotillas to mark this auspicious festival.
Happy Mid-Autumn Festival
Customary mooncakes are also baked and sent to relatives as a token of family bonding and reunion. This completes the cycle of unity and harmony within majority of local Chinese communities. Nowadays, mooncake festivals signify a casual celebration of sweet offerings and social camaraderie. Just an example of celebration of unity amongst all Malaysians! CSX is blessed in wishing everyone a joyous, harmonious, and prosperous Mid-Autumn Festival 2023. May your life be filled with love, laughter, merriment, and moonlit dream!