When is mooncake festival 2011? This year mooncake festival or mid autumn festival falls on 12 September 2011. The stores are busy cashing in on this with many displaying and selling mooncakes and lanterns for children from as early as the beginning of this month. These days the mooncakes come in all sorts of flavours and packaging. Sometimes I wonder whether they are selling the boxes or the mooncakes!

Then there are the flavours. There are chocolate mooncakes, ice-cream mooncakes, green tea mooncakes and …. and….. did someone say angry bird mooncakes? Yes. Now you can eat Angry Birds Mooncakes too! Rovio has released Angry Bird Mooncakes just in time for this year’s Mooncake Festival on 12 September, 2011.

Angry Birds Mid Autumn Festival

Picture Source: M.I.C Gadget

Angry Birds Mooncake

Picture Source: M.I.C Gadget

And while you are busy munching on your mooncake, you could sit back and watch your little ones play with that Angry Bird Lantern under the moonlit night.

Angry Bird Lantern

Picture Source: SueM11

Help! The Angry Birds have taken over earth! And now they’re headed for the moon!

Happy Mooncake Festival Everyone!

Twitter Layouts

The other day while I was at the Mall, I saw the “God of Prosperity” ie a chap dressed up like the above. You can see quite a lot of them at malls during this season. Some of them will be giving out mandarin oranges, or angpows (usually with vouchers in them) to entice you to buy, buy, BUY!

Anyway, this chap was fooling around. He was standing very still. If you did not know it, you would think that he was just a manequin. Then he would suddenly move much to the surprise and amusement of shoppers. All of a sudden he spoke……. in Malay to the shoppers. lol. A “God of Prosperity” who speaks Malay. That is what you get in a multiracial society.

Happy Chinese New Year to everyone! I will be back after I have finished eating, drinking and being merry which may take up to two to three weeks.

“Mummy, how many days till Chinese New Year?” the small one asked. “About a week” I replied and he went “Yeah!” while he glanced longingly at the Chinese New Year cookies and goodies laid out temptingly on the table.

The kids have been banned from touching the cookies until the eve of Chinese New Year. (no matter how much they plead). This is all part and parcel of the fun and the build-up and suspense towards Chinese New Year.

We have completed our home-made decorations. This year we decided to make angpow rabbits. We will be stringing and hanging them up on Monday with plenty of instructions from the kids. “Hang here, mummy. No, it looks nicer here.” etc.

Despite all our preparations, the cleaning up, making decorations, storing up cookies, buying new clothes, we actually celebrate Chinese New Year on a small scale with little or no visitors. Well, there is no law that says you can’t put up decorations to admire yourself right, so we do it year after year. We do balik kampung but it does not mean that this house where we stay should be neglected.

Though it is just the four of us, we make it into a big thing and create a big fuss for the kids delight and for ourselves too as a result. When the kids are happy, we are happy. So, we’re all set now to usher in the Year of the Rabbit…. well, almost. Still a bit of stuff to do here and there.

I shop just once a year during Chinese New Year and then we wear the clothing throughout the whole year. It helps me to save money and at the same time it creates excitement and a festive feeling for the kids. Since I shop just once a year, I can also have the excuse of picking up good quality clothing that may cost a bit more since we have to wear them all year round. The only disadvantage about doing this is the clothing price is higher during this peak season as some, like me will shop around this time.

I decided to do this, after my sister who shops all round the year told me that to her kids, Chinese New Year is nothing special because they have new clothes all the time. I want my kids to feel the same kind of excitement I felt as a child during CNY. So to me they should have new clothes during this time and not throughout the year. As children they outgrow their clothes very quickly so we will definitely need to buy them some so why not do it for Chinese New Year. Of course, we have to be careful to choose those that they can grow into and not out of quickly.

As a child, we always had new clothes during Chinese New Year and we will wear them on the first two days of Chinese New Year at least. Some of my more traditional aunties even have new clothes for each of the 15 days of Chinese New Year! Amazing! For us, we just target the first few days and we will usually buy mix and match outfits that we can pair with to create new looks.

We even had new sleepwear which we will wear after busy cleaning up house on the eve of Chinese New Year before having a good shower to wash away the old year. So I always buy new pyjamas for my kids and they love changing into them on the eve of Chinese New Year. They change into them, receive angpows from mummy and daddy and then they get to stay up late to welcome the New Year with the sounds of firecrackers and fireworks all around.  So exciting. On the first morning of Chinese New Year, the kids will get bundled into their new clothes and shoes. Oh, how they love it!

This year we also got new cushion covers and table cloths, all in the bright auspicious colour – red. Tradition is very much alive in my house even though we celebrate in a really small scale.

These days you have “digital” everything. Digital clock, digital cameras and even a digital perm.

So this year I went and got myself a digital perm. Ahem. What a painful experience it was, sitting in the hair salon for 4 hours having loads of solutions sprayed, applied and massaged into the hair. Oh the great lengths people will go to for beauty’s sake. The 4 hour process went something like this.

1. Hair washed and semi dried
2. Wait……(tapping fingers)
3. Hair trimmed. Snip. Snip. Snip
4. Off for another rinse and hair combed out
5. Wait…….(tapping fingers)
6. Hair was sprayed with some solution for treatment before perm
7. Wait………(tapping fingers)
8. Perming cream was massaged onto the hair and left on for a few minutes
9. Wait…….. (tapping fingers)
10. Rinse and semi dried again
11. Hair was curled up. Each curl had to be sprayed with more solution before curling. The curlers were big and had a wire at the end. Two rubber bands were used to secure the hair into each curler
12. Padding was placed under each curler
13. A big white thingy that looked like a hat with no top was put around my head near the scalp just before the hair begins
14. Each wire from each curler was then plugged into separate sockets from an electrical contraption to heat up each curler. (By now I felt like I was having an EEG rather than a hair perm)
15. Wait……. (Tap fingers)
16. Curlers were removed and hair smoothed out
17. Hair trimmed again
18. More solution was sprayed on hair
19. Had to lie back and look at the ceiling while hair was slowly airdried on a slow spray of air
20. All done

And that my friend is what women do in the name of beauty.

So. what is the verdict?

1. “Mummy, you look like a bad person.”
2. “Mummy, why did you choose this? “
3. “Mummy, I don’t like it.”
4. “Mummy, you look like a small girl.”
5. Small hands pulled at my hair. “I’m drying to pull it straight.”
6. “Ewe…. it does not feel nice like before. It feels hard.”

That came from the boy. The girl simply said “Mummy, I like it.” Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder so it really is unnecessary to “torture” oneself for 4 hours like this but since Chinese New Year is round the corner, so for the sake of age old tradition of “in with the new and out with the old” for everything including hair and even underwear for some judging from the numerous “new year” underwears (usually red with some auspicious design, lol) being sold for BOTH women as well as men. (I guess there must be a market for it!)

So this is how, In the name of beauty and for the sake of tradition, I waste 4 hours of my precious time. Not again!…. until next year, that is.