2011-09-12 Mid-Autumn Festival

Today is the mid-Autumn festival where people get together with their family and eat moon cake. We've received a couple of boxes of mooncakes which we plan to eat today, well at least one.

My supervisor in the English department wrote in an e-mail: "Hope you enjoy your first Chinese Festival---Mid Autumn Festival here. Generally it’s a family get together. We Chinese would like to sit outside, enjoy the full moon and eat the Moon Cake. Sometimes we will read the ancient Chinese poems relating to romantic stories. In Chinese culture, the moon represents a lot implications: the mood of one person; the romance etc. However, this year Xi’an has a lot of rain. We are told that tomorrow will still be raining. What a pity!"

The LA Times says - "According to custom, one is supposed to eat the cakes under the full moon on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month, which this year falls on Monday. Often extravagantly expensive, they are about the size of a hockey puck and just as dense. Fillings range from red bean with salted egg yolks to cheesecake to Peking duck.

Back in the era of scarcity, they were a rare calorie-rich treat to fill the chronically hungry belly. Nowadays, the mooncake has become the Christmas fruitcake of China, passed around and regifted ad infinitum.

A typical 6.3-ounce mooncake has about 800 calories. By contrast, a McDonald's hot fudge sundae, which weighs the same, has only 330 calories."