The Mid-Autumn Festival China's Mid-Autumn Festival, also named the Moon Festival, is traditionally celebrated on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunisolar month which is in September or October. The festival and Spring Festival, Ching Ming Festival and Dragon Boat Festival are the four most important festival of China. Getting together with family, admiring the moon and eating mooncake are the most central part of Mid-Autumn Festival. The festival is celebrated extensively across the country, and is one of the few reunion holidays for Chinese families. Every year, when the festival comes people go home from every corner of the country and the world to meet their family and have dinner with them.

The Mid-Autumn Festival can be dated back to over 3,000 years ago when there were moon worships in the Shang Dynasty (1600–1046 BC). However, not until the early Tang Dynasty (618–907) was the day officially celebrated as a traditional festival. It then became an established festival during the Song Dynasty (960–1279).

The custom of celebrating:
The very ancient China tends to admiring moon on this festival in a very serious way. This was first a costom of the noble and then gradually passed to the common people. 

The literati developed the serious admiring into relaxed joy. They usually wrote poems or essays to admire the moon and expressed their feelings at the same time. Singing, dancing and other activities were hold to celebrate the festival. Other celebrations include enjoying the display of various lanterns and riddle solvings.

The traditional food of Mid-Autumn Festival is mooncake. It indicates the reunion of the whole family. In the ancient time, mooncakes were used to worship the Luna. But gradually, the delicious and fullmoon-like food was passed to people for celebrating the festival.

The legend of Mid-Autumn Festival

There are many versions of the story of Houyi and Chang'e (or Chang Er), but some points are commonly shared. Chang'e is the wife of Houyi who is the hero of shooting extra suns. The Queen of Heaven gives Houyi elixir to thank his effort. Chang'e eats all of the elixir for some reason. Due to the effect of elixir, she has to leave the earth and decides to go to the moon.  

Other characters associated with the Moon and the Mid-Autumn Festival are Wu Gang and Jade Rabbit. Below are one of the versions of their stories.

Wu Gang was a shiftless fellow who changed apprenticeships all the time. One day he decided that he wanted to be an immortal. Wu Gang then went to live in the mountains where he importuned an immortal to teach him. First the immortal taught him about the herbs used to cure sickness, but after three days his characteristic restlessness returned and he asked the immortal to teach him something else. So the immortal decided to teach him chess. But after a short while Wu Gang was not interested any more. Then Wu Gang was given the books of immortality to study. Of course, Wu Gang became bored within a few days, and asked if they could travel to some new and exciting place. Angered with Wu Gang's impatience, the master banished Wu Gang to the Moon Palace telling him that he must cut down a huge cassia tree before he could return to earth. Though Wu Gang chopped day and night, the magical tree restored itself with each blow, and thus he is up there chopping still.

In one of the legend of Jade Rabbit, three fairy sages transformed themselves into pitiful old men and begged for something to eat from a fox, a monkey and a rabbit. The fox and the monkey both had food to give to the old men, but the rabbit, empty-handed, offered his own flesh instead, jumping into a blazing fire to cook himself. The sages were so touched by the rabbit's sacrifice that they let him live in the Moon Palace where he became the "Jade Rabbit."

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