Happy Autumn Moon!

This Sunday we celebrated our yearly Autumn Moon Festival in our backyard with the cousins and grandma and grandpa. Isabelle insisted on tiki torches for the patio and I found a few more sets of lights to string outside as well as an abundance of candles.

The kids started the party by dressing up in their silk outfits. Then we each painted a paper lantern or banner. The kids had a lot of fun doing this yearly craft so we have quite a collection of lanterns from all the past years too.



Then they headed outside grabbing the ribbon sticks to dance about the yard. Some were rainbow colored and others handmade from ribbons. A music tape was set up in the playhouse.

We made cookies with our chinese wooden cookie molds. Since we had purchased a box of mooncakes we just made cookies with vanilla and chocolate shortbread recipes (the chocolate was awesome!).




We ordered take out from our local Panda Wok and supplimented that with steamed buns and pork shumi from a chinese grocery store in Littleton.

After dinner we made tea and served it in our tiny tea sets from China and ate our mooncakes. Then we each took a lantern and a few floating candles and walked down to the river in the darkness. We could see the moon coming up through the clouds. Our little lanterns shown just enough light to walk by. At the river we each lit a candle and sent it floating down river with a prayer and moment of silence. It was so pretty! We walked back up towards the house and restarted our bonfire and toasted marshmallows and lit sparklers.

Mark was a bit under the weather and enjoyed the day relaxing watching sports on tv with Uncle Pete. Emma took over on cooking the steamed food (Mark's job) and did an excellent job. Mark didn't make it outside to enjoy the night lights and walk under the moonlight and we missed him. But the kids were busy enough to keep Robin, Grandma, and I running around.

Autumn Moon Festival

We celebrated our annual Autumn Moon Festival on Saturday. It just happened that grandma and grandpa were visiting and my sister, her husband, and two kids joined us as well. Friday night we were up late making the cookies. We pressed the dough into the wood molds and added bean paste and almond paste fillings.


On Saturday morning we gathered all our festival lights and pumpkin lights to set up our decorations on the porch. We usually celebrate in the playhouse but with so many joining us this year we had to improvise a bit.

Once everyone showed up and dressed in their chinese silk outfits, we started with decorating lanterns. We used my daughter's new set of watercolor pens and they worked out very well. I cut a cardstock 8.5x11 paper in half lengthwise and gave every kid a paper to work on. We brought out a few of the chinese "chop" stamps to use too.

When everyone had finished a panel or two I stapled them into a cylinder. I gathered up several glass jelly canning jars and candles placed the lantern collars around the jars. We lit up a bon fire in the back yard by the playhouse and toasted a few marshmallows (if you have a fire this is clearly required).




We put on the chinese music tape and the kids gathered up their ribbon sticks to dance about the yard. Its always so pretty at dusk as they run around with the smoke from the fire making everything so mysterious. They pretended to be dragons and raced about chasing each other.


We ordered chinese takeout for dinner to make it easier (with that many additional people) and the kids ate on the porch amongst all our lanterns and lights. After dinner we had our chinese green tea and mooncakes as well as a few fortune cookies.


We waited until the moon was up to take our traditional walk down to the river. We gathered up our handmade "lanterns" and one small flashlight and walked through the dark field and woods down to the bank of the river. There we set two apples afloat with small candles on the water. A beaver upstream was busy slapping the water and scaring the kids a bit. We stood in the moonlight quietly watching the candles float downstream saying a quiet prayer for loved ones near and far. My youngest -- hearing one too many "swamp monster" stories in her life made a quicker exit with grandma. I always love this walk by candlelight.