Mid-Autumn Festival

The cool part about adopting a kid from China is that you can start celebrating all of the fun Chinese holidays! Our daughter might not be home with us yet, but we celebrated the Mid-Autumn Festival yesterday (a day late) anyway. It's also called the Moon Festival, it's the second biggest holiday after Chinese New Year, and it falls on the 15th day of the 8th month of China's lunar calendar each year.

On this festival day, it's customary to eat mooncakes, admire the bright full moon, and think of family and friends who live far away. Seems rather appropriate! We have an awesome Asian store just a few miles away from our house, so Jonas and I picked up some dumplings for dinner and mooncakes for dessert. The best thing about celebrating a day late is that the mooncakes were 20% off! Mooncakes are beautiful circle-shaped pastries imprinted with Chinese characters for longevity or harmony. They are filled with sweet bean paste and a salted egg yolk, which represents the moon. They're pretty good, but very dense. We all shared just one!

It's also customary to celebrate with lanterns. Jonas picked a green lantern to light and send off to his sister underneath the full moon. Some day, we'll be able to tell our daughter we were thinking of her before she was even home. Next year, we look forward to eating mooncakes and lighting lanterns together as a family of four!

To Our Girl in China