Lantern Festival

This weekend there was the celebration of the Mooncake Festival.  For us, it meant a day off school (Monday) and the chance to enjoy really good food and a night walk around the neighbourhood.

The festival is based on Chinese mythology and centres around the story of Chang'e who is the moon goddess of immortality. The legend goes back about 2000 years ago.  It is one of those tough questions about whether to participate or not because it is a holiday based on mythology.  However, we decided to go and participate with our church; they organize a gathering every year.  This year was a bit different though because they teamed up with a pre-school in the neighbourhood and worked together to organize the event.  The pastor himself told me that the church wants to show that they can be part of this festival with its long history and social traditions, but also that it does not have to be about pagan religion; it is about building relationships.

It was a fun event at a park across the street from the church, with outdoor carnival games (eg throwing wet sponges at youth, toy bow and arrow shooting, stacking up toilet paper rolls as high as you can, face painting, throwing frisbees at a target, bouncing ping pong balls into buckets, a tic-tac-toe game, etc.)  Children won tickets that allowed them to "purchase" mini ice cream cones.  The games continued until the sun went down and it got too dark to see.

A Carnival game where Elizabeth is being shown how to  bounce the ping pong ball on the table and then hope it goes into one of the buckets.

Kate is throwing a ball to try and knock down the bowling pins.

Aimee is throwing a sponge at one of the youth.  Hannah (in the background) helped out with the game. 

Elizabeth enjoying her mini ice cream cone (with a fancy lantern hanging on the fence behind her) after playing the Carnival games.

Then we walked across the street to an outdoor patio beside the church.  Church families brought food.  There was a lot of it, both sweet and savoury!  We were asked to bring 50 cream puffs which we did.  We also brought a mooncake (a jade kind - a yellow centre with green around it and then a biscuit type cake around the outside of that) that was cut up into bite-size pieces.

This is what a typical mooncake looks like.  Different kinds of mooncakes have different kinds of designs on them.



This is the most similar to what the jade mooncake looked like that we brought.  It didn't have too much distinct flavour.  We had about two other mooncakes during the last 2 weeks, just to try them.  One was a charcoal mocha mooncake that Garth and Kate liked, but Hannah and I liked the chocolate cheese mooncake the best.  Aimee and Elizabeth didn't like either of them.  The chocolate one tasted like a thick, dense, chocolate cheesecake with less sugar and with a biscuit cookie exterior.







Chicken satey - one of the yummiest dishes. Usually served in a peanut sauce.



This was one of my (Eileen) favourite foods - a savoury, soft, cold perogie -type ball with cabbage and carrot (I think) in it.

Like the pink dessert at the very top, this was like a chewy, rice and gelatin -type dessert, with a sweetened coconut milk topping.

There were a lot of people, maybe 300-400 people including children, which a friend said was about double from the year before, because the pre-school was involved this year.  At the conclusion of the event, everyone took a walk around the neightbourhood - you could choose the short walk or the long walk.  We choose the short walk, which still took about 20 minutes.  The walkers who took the longer route were another 15 minutes behind us.  We carried lanterns we borrowed that are made from paper and had a candle, like a small birthday candle, inside them.  Other people had lanterns that were made of hard or soft plastic.  Some of the hard plastic lanterns even made sounds.

Before we headed out for the walk around the neighbourhood, the crowd sang a song in Bahasa that we obviously did not know.  Then we did the Chicken Dance (in English).  Below is the Congo Line we did after that.



This was a really cute monkey lantern we saw. All the lanterns are carried by holding a stick. This way your hand is removed from the heat of the candle inside the lantern.

We are about to set out on our neighbourhood walk.




This is a lantern that has "crashed and burned". You could hear children crying in the crowd when this happened to their lantern.  All that was left was ash and a melted candle.  With the crowd bumping into each other and children "playing" with fire, this event would never be allowed to happen in Canada - a fire disaster waiting to happen.   But it was all part of a wonderful evening here in Penang, Malaysia.