Chinese Holidays

The Chinese year has a lot of official holidays, and we had two of them right next to each other in November. The first was the Moon Festival, and apparently, the story I remember hearing from that cartoon Sagwa was right. Part of the celebration of the Moon Festival is that Chinese would use Moon Cakes to pass messages to each other when they were fighting the Mongols. It helped them win.

There's an even older story that comes from before then, as told to me by the HR department at school. It goes something like this: long ago, there were 10 suns in the sky. Too many suns were killing earth, so an archer shot down 9 of the suns. As a reward, a Chinese goddess gave him an elixir to make him immortal. He didn't want to live without his wife, however, so he didn't drink it. Then some bad guys found out about the elixir and tried to steal it; in order to protect it, his wife drank it all. This made her fly to the moon. To celebrate her, the archer and the other Chinese people stayed up late and lit lanterns in her memory.

There were lanterns all over the place leading up to the Moon Festival:

In the week before the Moon Festival, there were moon cakes everywhere. Even at KFC:

KFC is pretty much taking over China. 

So the Moon Festival was one holiday. The other holiday is today, October 1, which is National Day for the People's Republic of China (PRC). We have a week of work off for the National Day, much to my delight!

This week is called the Golden Week, and it's a time for a lot of Chinese people to travel around China and visit the rest of the country. I did not do this, since traveling is difficult this week, but maybe that's what I'll do next year if I can book my tickets in advance.