I don’t understand Taiwanese holidays

A look at Mid-Autumn Festival.

Last week’s full moon brought the Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋节) or Moon Festival, the second-largest holiday in Taiwan after Lunar New Year. I can give the broad strokes: It’s akin to a harvest celebration that gives thanks for the fall’s bounty, and involves gathering with family for a meal. People share round foods that resemble the full moon, specifically mooncakes and big green pomelo fruits. In Taiwan’s unique twist, as opposed to the rest of the Chinese diaspora, families barbecue together. 

It’s my third Mid-Autumn Festival and I cannot get past the Wikipedia version of the holiday. We are sent box after giant, laminated, expensive, wasted box of shiny, lard-packed mooncakes doled out by corporations, the pastries stuffed with dense, sticky lotus or red-bean paste. Does anyone even eat these hockey pucks?? I wonder as I break down all the boxes. I don’t really get the holiday, but what are holidays if not layers upon layers, generations upon generations, of memories and myths and family tradition that cannot be explained with the basic facts? I don’t personally celebrate December 25 as the birth of humanity’s savior, but I have hundreds of important associations and memories and feelings about Christmas anyway. Sometimes I realize I’m still watching Taiwanese cultural rites play out like a museum exhibit—a diorama, under glass. Many aspects are by nature inward and family-based, which is to say: not for me. In an Uber ride home Tuesday night, at the height of the holiday, we drove past a family celebrating on the sidewalk in front of mini-grills, a dad handing out fresh skewers, the kids rowdy and laughing. It was the clearest I’ve seen yet of the joy of the day.

Snapshot: In my apartment’s lobby recently, the doormen loaded cases of pomelos on a grocery cart to bring them up to an apartment.