For me now, there is only one childhood memory about Mid-Autumn Festival: the moon is too big and round!
In childhood, only two festivals can wait at night, one is New Year's Eve and the other is Mid-Autumn Festival. Every year on New Year's Eve, children will play for a day, immersed in the festive atmosphere, unable to calm down for a moment, looking forward to new clothes and lucky money the next morning, waiting for the bell on TV to ring and waiting for another year. On the night of Mid-Autumn Festival, looking at a table of moon cakes and fruits, waiting for the delicious food after the worship, I always ask my parents when the worship is over and when I can eat it. Often before my good fortune begins, I have fallen asleep in my dream.
When I was a child, the Mid-Autumn Festival seemed more grand. This grand atmosphere is different from the seemingly festive atmosphere now, and more is the real existence of this festival in everyone's heart.
I managed to get to school, trotted home, dropped my schoolbag and saw that my busy parents had not come back yet. Then my friends and I went out to roll hoop in the alley and fish in the stagnant pond. Then I saw my parents pulling carts and carrying shovels full of weeds, running home and grabbing exercise books. Then I saw my parents washing their hands and drinking tea, feeding chaff to chickens and rice to pigs. Then my father sat in the yard and smoked silently. My mother is washing vegetables and cooking in the kitchen, tinkling. I am doing my homework in my room, peeking out of the window from time to time and smelling delicious food. The handwriting in my exercise book is more and more scribbled, and I am more and more worried.
For children, besides fun, only delicious food can make them take their hands off without crying or laughing and seriously devote themselves to a new kind of attention. Regarding the taste of childhood, the Mid-Autumn Festival has a stronger flavor.
Unlike ice cream moon cakes, gold moon cakes and childhood moon cakes, they are all made at home. There are steaming and baking, big and small. From flour and eggs for making moon cakes to firewood and coal for baking moon cakes, they are all made by themselves. Sometimes neighbors use an oven together, and then make a fire, and housewives start to get busy. You knead the dough, she poses, she cooks, and she cooks in an orderly way. The men take turns lifting the oven, cooking and smoking a cigarette from time to time. Children are playing with paper-stacked airplanes in the yard, listening to the fragrance of new moon cakes floating out of the pot. They are like a group of little sparrows.
Mid-Autumn Festival, making moon cakes. Jujube cake, mung bean paste, and a red plum blossom in the middle. Watermelon lamp, empty in the middle, candlelight and moonlight blend together. It's late at night, look up, and moon cakes and fruits offer the moon.
Make moon cakes, have dinner, wait for the moon to climb the branches, and we will begin to offer the moon. My father even took out his own peerless knife method, carved a watermelon lamp on a round watermelon, cut off the petals of apples and pears, and decorated the plate with small things such as grapes, autumn dates and golden red fruits, as if to present a grand flat peach conference for the moon. The children looked at the melons and fruits, funny watermelon lights and the moon outside the window, feeling so round and close.
As a child, Mid-Autumn Festival has more sense of belonging. Although relatives and neighbors are not good at expressing their feelings, on this particular day, they often sit in the yard together, chatting and enjoying the moon, which is a very quiet feeling. I always look at the big round moon, trying to see the Chang 'e, Jade Rabbit and their Guanghan Palace in the story.
Until I arrived in Shanghai, I ate mooncakes with egg yolk and lotus seed paste and fresh meat ice cream, which ended my understanding that mooncakes are only sweet and flour. Whenever I walk with my children in the community at night and listen to the children say that dad, dad and the fangs of the moon have all come out, I will feel that this round of moon is so small and far away, far away from the moon in my childhood memory. Think again, there are local accents, neighbors and innocent friends who left together.
No matter how delicious the moon cakes are, you can't find the feeling of that year. Time always flies by. When I was a child, my mother pointed to the moon and said that my ears would be cut off. I was lying on the haystack with my friends and looking at the round and big moon. I was silent and scared, but I was extremely happy. I only remember that the sky is blue, the moon is round and big, there are many stars, and the wind is cold.
I believe that in the future, we will miss us now. May friends and partners who have been together enjoy the bright moon, recall the good times together and face the future life healthily and happily!