Mid-Autumn Festival

I celebrate mid-autumn festival the usual way-- mooncakes, lanterns... but perhaps it is just out of habit that I do so. This year we commemorated it a little earlier, on Sunday night, but perhaps only because my brother badgered me to come out into the garden to light the lanterns with him.



It wasn't hard to understand his enthusiasm... I had spent every mid-autumn festival in my childhood looking forward to the same familiar routine, come rain or moonshine: once we've retrieved that big red candle from the drawer beneath the praying altar, our game commences: lighting fire sparklers, lighting candles, lighting lanterns.


In a couple of previous years we would stick candles to styrofoam boxes, and float it across the pond, watching the flickering candle flames light up sections of the water... in the night there would be utter silence, save for the running patter of the water, and watching the styrofoam boat, alone, carrying the lighted candles, rocking gently above the ripples, offers a moment of absolute serenity that till now I do occasionally yearn for.

It's a lot of nostalgia, the season. When both my brother and I were much younger, I'd play with my youngest aunt (strictly speaking, but then she was only a year older than I was), or my cousins... later on it would be my grandpa--who's no longer around, now, then occasionally my dad, and then of course my mum, who'd do all the lantern-lighting in the most systematic way possible. Parents were occupied this time, so this year was just the two of us.



Okay that was quite poser. My brother kept irritating me ("Eh! Can already or not? Aiyah I take already hor." "Can already? Wei faster leh I want to go and light the other candles!") and I couldn't take my ideal in-action shot. Nor even look vaguely contemplative. Hrmph.

Anyhow. I think we didn't do too badly, though:



Pretty. Flickering flames are quite fascinating to watch on their own, but sheltered within a pretty traditional translucent paper cover and strung properly in a row, and they become endearingly pretty. =)


中秋节快乐, everyone!