Mid Autumn Festival aka Lantern Festival aka Zhong Qiu Jie aka stuff your face full with mooncakes!

Time passes so fast, it's once again the mid-autumn festival. Lanterns, mooncakes and chinese tea comes into mind, so does a certain year, an ex colleague, supposingly (it was a secret actually), set fire to his office in my ex-company, committed suicide on this day. For those who do not know, mid autumn festival, besides all the eating of mooncakes and carrying of paper lanterns (rather now it's plastic lanterns with batteries and lights and irritating music playing), I would prefer the paper kind with candles, with the possibility of fire burning through the lantern anytime than that, has another more profound meaning, it's called Reunion. Mid-autumn festival is also Reunion Festival. Families and friends gather together to eat mooncakes, drink chinese tea and admire the moon (quite literally),while kids run around carrying lanterns and playing with candles.

I remembered when I was young, teachers would make us draw activities during lantern festival and I remembered taking home 2nd place in a drawing competition which shows me drawing stick people carrying lanterns around a park (I presume) and a huge yellow moon hanging overhead. I remembered someone taking pictures of me standing underneath my 2nd place drawing and me carrying my present.
I would usually go downstairs at night and join my cousins and neighbours all happily congregating at the bottom of our block with the adults sitting and standing around talking and the kids screaming, running and chasing each other, all carrying our paper lanterns. After which, we would all go to the playground and play with the leftover candles. We would line tiny colourful candles all around the playground, build mini sand birthday cakes and pretend we're having a birthday party and the so-called naughtier kids,(usually the boys) would gather dried leaves and twigs and papers and start a mini bonfire underneath the concrete slabs of the playground... Those were the fun and carefree days!

I remembered one year, after all the fun playing at our void deck, my younger brother and myself came upstairs to our flat, still reluctant to extinguish the candle in our paper lanterns, so mom hanged our lanterns on top of our fridge in the kitchen and we off all the lights so we can see our lanterns shining brightly in the dark house. Finally tired of watching the lanterns, together with our parents, we troupe back to my parents room to watch TV. I had a sudden urge to urinate in the midst of some programme and i walked out of my mom's room in time to see a fire starting right on top of our fridge. The fire from the candle had burnt right through the lanterns and both lanterns were on fire! I screamed for my parents and it was panicked from there. My dad rushed to off the electricity of the fridge and mom rushed to douse the fire from the lanterns. Luckily the fire just started so besides a black patch on our ceiling directly on top of the fridge and a minor burnt on the top of the fridge, there was no other damage. It was a fright, nevertheless for us kids and gave us first hand experience that fire is SCARY, not just fun.
Those were the fun and not so fun days of all my mid-autumn festivals I've celebrated in my life and at present, there is nothing much fun to do on this particular day anymore. Too old for lanterns, mooncakes too much colestrol to consume and chinese tea I get to drink everyday. However, there's one thing that never change, the moon is always the brightest and biggest on this night and there's one thing I've never failed to do on this night, watch the moon and wonder if there're others out there watching us too?!

Happy Mid-Autumn's Festival!!