How did You Celebrate Mid-Autumn Festival?

Mid-Autumn Festival is one the most important festivals among the Chinese. It's probably the second most celebrated festival by the Chinese all around the world after Chinese New Year. Mid-Autumn Festival falls on the 15th day of the 8th lunar month every year. The Mid-Autumn Festival has several names, I guess for the foodies we'd call it the Mooncake Festival, and some just called it Moon Festival.

There is a long history and legend associated with Mid-Autumn Festival. But for the past thousand of years, it's the romantic story of Lady Chang’er and Hou Yi that captures our hearts. At Christmas, there is Santa Claus, Rudolf, Elves, Christmas tree and goodies. Likewise, in Mid-Autumn Festival, we have Lady Chang'er, Hou Yi, rabbit, a full moon and mooncake! This is why it's very common to see Mid-Autumn Festival picture depicts a big yellow moon with an anceint beauty sitting/flying in it... sometimes they'd throw in the bunny as well.

Photo by Julie & Kevin.

Traditionally, on this day family and friends would get together to celebrate the festival. Generally after dinner, family and friends would enjoy some delicious mooncakes with a cup of warm tea together in the cool autumn night appreciating the beautiful bright full moon. In fact, this year the moon was not only a full moon, it was a total lunar ecliipse and super blood moon. It was spectacular to watch the eclipse happened right in front of my eyes and as it slowly became a blood moon. The next time you'd see this rare phenomena again will be in 2033. I'm grateful that I was able to catch it with my family, and my kids brought along their favorite mooncakes too! Nothing says a perfect mid autumn night then this! Here are a couple of pictures I took that night.

Photo by May Yap

Photo by May Yap.

But I think the most amazing thing of all is the Mid-Autumn Festival orgnanized by OCCA. For most of us here, Omaha has become our home away from home. To me it's amazing to be able to celebrate our traditions/festivals here at Omaha at such scale. And this is possible because of OCCA! With the effort of nearly 50 volunteers, we managed to pull off this once a year grand celebration with a bam! The preparation started months ago for our organizers!

Photo by Julie & Kevin.

The festival was held at Lake Zorinsky and the afternoon was jam-packed with activities, performances, and of course good food! We have people travel from all around Nebraska to come to Omaha to join us. We had about 500 people that day! Amazing! There were so many great performances and activities but Zumba got the most feet dancing away at the festival!

Photo by Julie/Kevin

However, Zumba was not the only workout we got that day! The festival was kicked off with a 5K run. In the spirit of supporting OCCA and it's goal to build a center at Omaha, a fundraising event was organized - "Run For OCCA" where teams were formed to compete to see who raised the most money! In returns for their donors' supports, teams had to complete a 5k run at the festival! Proud to say, these teams had raised nearly $3,600 for our dream of "One Center, One Community." Your support is vital to OCCA's presence in Omaha. In order to continue to have festivals like that, we need to be able to count on your support!

Photo by Julie/Kevin

Finally, let's take a moment to recognize some of our sponsors. Their generous gifts definitely added extra excitements to our prize drawing game! Thank you Hong Zheng of Asian Market, David Liu from Liu's Enterprise and Ping Ye. Also, take a minute to read a Thank You note posted by the President of OCCA, Linda Steele. Click here to read.