"Mooncake" Festival

People love to invent new terms.

On the fifteenth day of the eighth Lunar month every year, the Chinese celebrate the ________ Festival by eating mooncakes.

The name “Mooncake Festival” was conveniently came up with.

Well, mooncakes are never missed out during this festival, so it is "plainly logical" to call it the “Mooncake Festival”. Easy to remember, and close to the hearts.

But, it has become so widely used that, have you, too, forgotten the actual name of the festival?

It is “MID AUTUMN FESTIVAL”. Let me emphasize it here, lest you go out and embarrass yourself when you talk to others.

This is, of course, not the only colloquial expression for a festival that people have come up with (or did people not know the actual name and made a plain mistake of calling it something else?), but the most common one I would say.

There is nothing wrong with making up a term that is understood by one and all, and which needs no further explanation. But making everything simplified is not always the best solution. Certain meaning in the actual cause might be lost along the way.

Why Mid Autumn Festival?
According to the lunar calendar, the festival occurs at the exact middle of autumn (which begins in the seventh month and ends in the ninth), thus the term “mid autum”. The origin of this festival can be traced back to the ancient Xia and Shang Dynasties. In the Zhou Dynasty, ceremonies were held to greet winter and worship the moon whenever the Mid-Autumn Festival sets in. At this time, the moon's orbit is at its lowest angle to the horizon, making the moon appear brighter and larger than any other time of the year. The round shape symbolizes family reunion. This is a time for family members to get together and enjoy the full moon—an auspicious token of abundance, harmony and luck.

How did the mooncakes come into play?
During the Yuan dynasty, leaders from the preceding Song dynasty did not want to submit to the Mongolian rule, and decided to coordinate a rebellion without being discovered. The leaders of the rebellion, knowing that the Mid Autumn Festival was drawing near, ordered the making of special cakes: mooncakes. Hidden in each mooncake was a message with the outline of the attack. On the night of the Mid Autumn Festival, the rebels successfully attacked and overthrown the government. Today, mooncakes are eaten to commemorate this legend.

We can see that mooncakes are closely associated with the Mid Autumn Festival, so it would not have been “far from history” to name it the "Mooncake Festival".

Nevertheless, there is still a disparity between the actual name and the colloquial name. Had mooncakes not been invented, but some other snacks, the name of the festival would have been a totally different story.

“Mooncake festival” also gives us the wrong notion that it is so called because we celebrate the festival with mooncakes. But, that is just one small part of the whole picture.

Food for thought: we celebrate the Chinese Lunar New Year every year with the elders distributing hongbaos. I wonder if our further generations might call it the “Hongbao Festival”, out of convenience as well? I think if that happens, our ancestors would turn in their graves in angst!

Note: part of the historical information was taken from the web.