Chinese Holidays - how do you properly celebrate them in America?

Today is the Mid Autumn Moon Festival. To be honest, it slipped right by me. As it has done every year since we brought Turtle home. Luckily she is 4 and doesn't know yet what she is missing. But she soon will. As an adoptive parent of a Chinese child, I feel it is incumbent upon me to help her embrace and celebrate her birth culture.

You can glean some information on the internet about the various holidays and their significance but not a true understanding of their celebrations. The Mid Autumn Moon Festival started as mountain worship following a successful harvest. It morphed into moon worship over the years and now the primary symbol of the festival are lit up lanterns. No one is really sure when and why lanterns were introduced, but it is now so significant that to have a celebration without them would be like Christmas without Santa Claus. We have two lanterns that were given to us long before we were matched with Turtle. They don't light up and hang in her, as yet unoccupied, sister's room. The fringe is coming off of one of them, but they are still lovely to look at.

The moon cake is another very important piece of the festival. Families make the moon cakes and distribute them among family members to signify the importance of family. However, if you have ever tasted a mooncake, you know it tastes like sawdust. That must be why they drink tea with it; to help wash it down. The mooncake recipes I found on the internet were complicated. Not something a full-time working mom can really tackle on a weeknight. Of course, had it not slipped by me, I could have made them last weekend. But it did slip by me. And now I think I may make cupcakes or muffins because they are round and that shape is important because the round shape symbolizes completeness and unity. Nothing says unity like eating a delicious cupcake together.

Chinese New Year is the other big holiday that I know of. This holiday involves spring cleaning, which I can definitely get behind. As Turtle gets older, she can have assigned tasks to help the family cleanse the house of ill fortune and allow the good fortune to come in. Definitely sounds like a great tradition. We are supposed to decorate our windows and doors with red paper-cuts and couplets that say things like happiness, good fortune, longevity, etc. Chinese New Year also involves fireworks and red envelopes containing money. The red envelopes are given to children and they are supposed to sleep with them under their pillows for seven days. Here is the rub: Chinese New Year is 15 days long and there are prescribed activities for each day. On day one we are supposed to light fireworks and burn bamboo sticks while welcoming in the deities of heaven and earth. If we could find them, we might be able to manage the bamboo sticks.

Day five I can get behind. It is the day of eating jiaozi, or dumplings. We enjoy making dumplings and it can be a wonderful family activity. Eating them is the best part. Again, we are supposed to light off fireworks. Day seven involves eating raw fish salad. I wonder if sushi would count. Day eight is a family dinner honoring the birth of the Jade Emperor. Now I have a new research assignment: who is the Jade Emperor and why is he important?

Day thirteen is a vegetarian day to cleanse out the body from eating too much food in the days prior. Day fifteen is the Lantern festival. We are supposed to walk the streets with lighted lanterns and eat glutinous rice ball soup. Goodness. Not sure what the neighbors will think to see us trooping through the streets with our lit up lanterns guiding the spirits as we go.

What other major holidays are there? Almost all other cultures have more holidays than we do in the US. Our major ones are Thanksgiving and Independence Day. We have smaller ones like Memorial Day and Labor Day and even smaller ones like Veterans Day and Martin Luther King Jr Day. Sadly, the US works it's people far more days than any other country, so constructing the celebrations for Chinese holidays can be tricky with both parents working full-time. Dumplings can take all day to make; mooncakes are no easy feat either. Sometimes the food we are supposed to consume is next to impossible to get in the US like a nine-jointed lotus root. There are Asian markets in our metro area, but I seriously doubt they will have that.

How do you celebrate your child's birth cultural traditions?