Logo of Google in Mid-Autumn Day ->
In this year, the National Day and the Mid-Autumn Day come together. It’s a pity that the seven-day holiday doesn’t last longer for this reason. National Day is our legal holiday which is written in our law, but the Mid-Autumn tends to be more like a traditional holiday.
The Chinese National Day is not much like the Independence Day in America, which has a historical meaning to American people in the process of founding their country. Surely our National Day has its political meaning that our Republic is founded on that day, but surely the founding of our country can be at October the second or some day else. Partly it is a decision of the government, and the October the first might sound to be a good start. But who cares? The most important is the seven-day off from work. In another point of view, such a long holiday equals a disaster. Many employees in companies take the time to travel around the country. The result is every tourist sites and shopping centers are flooded with thousands of people. Only to think about the people would appear in Tian’an Men Square and Wang Fu Jing, I would feel sick. So I tend to just stay at my pit for these seven days, but I have to visit my grandparents anyway.
Talked about the Mid-Autumn Day, it might be the most important traditional holiday which survives after many years, but it is commercialized. Most of the traditional holidays have been commercialized into something related to eating. The special food for Mid-Autumn Day is moon cake. Actually, I hate this food for certain reasons. It’s too sweet, and for it has been commercialized, a piece of moon cake is expensive as a cake made of gold. It is no longer a food just for home eating. It partly becomes a kind of gift, not simply for eating. I believe if you have to eat the same food for the next half-year after the holiday, you would hate the food, too. It seems that other things related to the holiday have already disappeared, I’ve read in A Moment in Peking that they used to eat crab during the Mid-Autumn Day and the whole family gathered together to enjoy the sight of moon. But I don’t think we could see the moon today. The pollutants have covered the sky. There are also some other things related to the holiday that I had never heard of before, like the “Rabbit Grandpa”. It might be just another thing that can bring benefits to those merchants after all.
"Rabbit Grandpa" picture from Here
Other information related to Mid-Autumn Day, click Here.
2 comments:
Every holiday in America has become commercialized in one way or another. Independence Day is probably the least commercialized of the bunch, actually. Although it is called "Independence Day", it is also commonly referred to as simply "July 4th". I still remember when my family used to go to the roof of my dad's office building to watch the downtown fireworks show. There are lots of fireworks on July 4th. (The Chinese invented fireworks, and then we stole them from you :)
The reason that the holiday falls on July 4th is because that is the day of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Although you could say that this was when America was founded, we still had to actually win the war with Great Britain and then set up a government. Our first government was terrible, so the country didn't really get started until 1791.
By the way, we have a holiday in America called Halloween. It is like Mid-Autumn day in that it has a signature food that is really terrible: candy corn.
I like the detailed introduction of Independence Day you wrote.
I know Halloween and the saying of "Treat or Trick",but I've no idea what is candy corn.
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