If you ask a Chinese person what the Mid-Autumn Festival means, many people might give you the same answer: Family reunion.

It’s a word we’ve heard since childhood. The moon is full, so people should come together. When I was a child, my idea of a reunion was very simple: everyone sitting around the same big table, with lots of food in front of us, eating together, having mooncakes, and looking at the moon.

It almost felt as if a festival wasn’t complete unless everyone was sitting at that table at the same time. But now, we all have our own families and our own lives. Our parents have their own homes. Our brothers and sisters have their own lives. Our children are growing up.

A few days before the festival, I wrote about how we were planning to split the day between two households — you can read that plan here: How My Family Celebrates Mid-Autumn Festival in China.

So this year, our Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival didn’t look like a traditional “big family reunion.” In fact, from beginning to end, there wasn’t even one meal where everyone in our extended family sat down and ate together.

And yet, after the festival was over, I found myself feeling that this was one of the Mid-Autumn Festivals I wanted to remember most. Maybe because it felt real.

And in a way, this Mid-Autumn Festival in China actually began before the holiday itself—with a trip to the supermarket.

The Supermarket Was Already Celebrating Before the Festival Arrived

The evening before the Mid-Autumn Festival and again on the morning of the festival, I went to the supermarket to buy things for our barbecue that evening.

The supermarket felt completely different from an ordinary day. There were people everywhere.

The fruit section was crowded. People were waiting at the meat counters. Shopping carts were noticeably fuller than usual. Pomegranates were piled up like little mountains. There were baskets of peaches and nectarines everywhere. On an ordinary day, you might buy just enough fruit for two or three people.

Before a traditional holiday, somehow you start picking up a little more of everything. More meat. More shrimp. More fruit. More things to put on the table. When I went to buy the shrimp, I even had to wait in line. Some of this — the extra shrimp, the extra fruit, the mental math of who’s eating what — is exactly what I now track on a Holidays Shopping List instead of trying to remember it all mid-aisle.

Standing there, I suddenly found the whole scene quite interesting. Nobody had announced, “The Mid-Autumn Festival has arrived. Everyone, start preparing!” But the entire supermarket somehow knew.

I think this is one of the things I find interesting about Mid-Autumn Festival traditions in China. A Chinese holiday doesn’t always begin with a formal ceremony. Sometimes it begins when we start thinking: Who is coming home to eat? And then we buy a little more food.

For Me, the Food Isn’t Really the Most Important Part

Of course, the Mid-Autumn Festival has mooncakes, moon-gazing, and stories that have been passed down for generations. But if you ask me what this festival means to me now, I’d still say: Seeing family—especially our parents.

There is something interesting about many Chinese families. During ordinary life, everyone is busy with their own routines. Once children grow up, they have jobs, partners, homes, and their own responsibilities. Parents have their own daily lives too. We don’t necessarily sit down together every day. So when a traditional holiday comes around, there’s often a very natural thought: Maybe we should go home and see Mom and Dad.

Maybe it’s just lunch. Maybe it’s only a few hours. Maybe you bring your child along and sit there for a while. But that act of going home becomes part of the holiday itself.

Our Mid-Autumn Festival Morning Started With a Family Visit

On the morning of the festival, my husband took our daughter to visit her grandparents. This was almost exactly the schedule I’d laid out on my Family Celebration Planner a few days before — right down to who’d be where, and when.

They left a little after 9 a.m. It normally takes about an hour to get there. That morning, it took almost twice as long. The journey turned into nearly two hours because of the traffic. I suppose the enthusiasm for going home for the holiday was being expressed very clearly on the roads.

Everyone was going somewhere. Everyone was carrying food or gifts. Everyone was trying to get home. In its own strange way, even the traffic felt like part of the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival.

A Simple and Warm Family Lunch at Grandma and Grandpa’s House

My husband’s parents prepared a simple lunch. There was steamed fish, braised tofu skin, stewed beef ribs, and a few other dishes. If you put the meal in a photograph by itself, I don’t think anyone would call it an especially elaborate holiday feast. And I actually like that.

Grandparents cook what they like to eat. They add something the child likes. Everyone sits down together. The fish is still the same fish. The rice is still the same rice. The food isn’t necessarily different from what they might cook on another day. The difference is simply that today, their granddaughter is there.

When my husband came home, he told me about their lunch. And I kept imagining a very ordinary scene: My daughter sitting next to her grandparents. Three generations having lunch together.

No elaborate ceremony. No perfectly decorated table. Just family. I think this is what a lot of Chinese family celebrations really look like. It isn’t always about doing something big. Sometimes it’s simply about making sure you see each other when the day comes.

While They Were Having Lunch, I Was Preparing Our Evening Gathering

After my husband and daughter left for their grandparents’ house, I stayed home and started preparing our barbecue.

This was when my own Mid-Autumn Festival really began.

There was shrimp and squid to clean. Beef, lamb, and pork belly to cut into pieces. Chicken wings to score. Chicken to cut and marinate. Red and yellow bell peppers to prepare. Enoki mushrooms, mushrooms, potatoes, and sliced steamed buns also needed to be prepared. Then came the skewers. Chicken skewers. Tofu. Bacon-wrapped enoki mushrooms. Sausage. Potatoes. Beef and bell peppers. And whole shell-on shrimp. One by one, the skewers slowly filled the table. By the end, there were more than a hundred of them.

We used a mix of two kinds of skewers that day. Plain bamboo ones — [something like these] — handled most of it fine. But for the chicken wings and thicker cuts of meat, bamboo just wasn’t going to cut it — literally. That’s where a set of flat metal skewers earns its keep; we went back and forth between [these] and [these OXO ones], and both did the job.

This is the part of the holiday I now actually write down — the marinating, the skewering, the hundred small tasks nobody sees — on a Holidays To Do List, if only so I remember how much work ‘just a barbecue’ really is.

Preparing everything was actually quite tiring. But while I was doing it, I thought about something. When we look at a family holiday, we usually see only the final few hours. The food on the table. Everyone sitting together. The smiles. Maybe a family photo.

But before those moments happen, someone has already spent hours making them possible. Someone goes to the supermarket. Someone waits in line for the shrimp. Someone washes vegetables. Someone cuts meat. Someone marinates the chicken. Someone makes more than a hundred skewers. And later, someone has to clean everything up.

These things seem so ordinary that we rarely think of them as part of the holiday. But they are. A holiday often begins much earlier than we realize.

Around 3:30 p.m., Everyone Started Coming Home

My younger brother and his girlfriend arrived at around 3:30 p.m.

About half an hour later, my husband and daughter came home from their grandparents’ house. As soon as my husband walked through the door, he started getting the barbecue fire ready. The grill was set up. The charcoal slowly began to glow. The grill we actually used isn’t this exact one, but if you’re thinking about setting up something similar in your own backyard, a barrel-style charcoal grill with a side shelf — like this one or this one from Kendane — gives you the same setup: plenty of grate space, plus somewhere to keep the sauce and the next batch of skewers within reach.

The quiet yard suddenly became full of sounds. People talking. Food being prepared. Someone standing beside the grill. Someone asking when the next batch would be ready.

And I remember looking around and thinking how strange and wonderful it was. That morning, my daughter had been sitting at her grandparents’ dining table. I had been alone in my kitchen preparing food. My brother and his girlfriend had been coming from somewhere else. We all had completely separate lives. And yet, by the afternoon, we had somehow ended up in the same yard again.

Maybe this is what family reunion looks like for us now. We live our separate lives. But when a special day comes around, we still make room for one another.

Once the Charcoal Was Lit, the Festival Finally Took Shape

The first batch of chicken wings went onto the grill. The shrimp curled up as they hit the heat, slowly turning pink. Beef and bell peppers were threaded onto the skewers together. As the fat dripped into the charcoal, the fire suddenly flared up with a loud sizzle. Soon, the whole yard smelled like barbecue.

Someone was waiting for the next skewer. Someone was eating while talking. The television was on in the background. Fruit was brought outside. There was watermelon, pomelo, mandarins, wax apples, and red grapes. There were drinks. There were cold dishes. And, of course, there were mooncakes at the end.

If you’re outside China and curious to try some, Daoxiangcun itself doesn’t ship internationally, but a few options come close: this mixed mini-mooncake box if you want to sample several flavors at once, [this assorted gift box] if you want something closer to what we actually had, or [this Cantonese-style 8-piece pack] if you prefer the classic lotus-paste style.

We hadn’t spent the entire day together. We didn’t have one big traditional family reunion meal. Our dinner wasn’t even a traditional Chinese banquet. It was barbecue. But somehow, this felt very much like a real Mid-Autumn Festival in China.

Tradition hasn’t disappeared. It has simply become part of everyday life. We still think about our families on the Mid-Autumn Festival. We still buy mooncakes. We still visit our parents. But we also eat barbecue, watch television, talk about ordinary things, and eventually eat far too much.

And Yes, We Definitely Ate Too Much

When I was preparing all the food, I had absolutely no idea how much I had bought. At first, everyone was eating happily. Chicken wings. Beef. Lamb. Shrimp. Tofu. Bacon-wrapped enoki mushrooms. One plate after another. Then we had fruit. Then mooncakes.

Eventually, it wasn’t even about whether we were hungry anymore. It was more like: “I’ll just have one more.” And then you really do have one more.

So if I had to give the day one completely honest summary: My weight-loss plan failed.

But honestly, I think that’s okay. Everyday life already has so many things that need to be calculated. Sometimes a holiday is allowed to interrupt all of that for a while. Sometimes eating too much, staying at the table too long, and having a completely “unproductive” evening is exactly what makes it special.

After Everyone Left at 9:30 p.m.

My brother and his girlfriend left at around 9:30 p.m.

Then the three of us started cleaning. The barbecue grill. The dining table. The kitchen. The dishes. The leftover ingredients. Everything that had accumulated throughout the evening. It took about an hour. I probably wouldn’t have thought about photographing this part in the past. It wasn’t beautiful. It didn’t look like a holiday. But now, I increasingly feel that this part deserves to be remembered too.

Because a holiday isn’t only the few hours when everything is lively. It starts in the crowded supermarket. It starts when you wait in line for shrimp. It starts when someone spends several hours preparing the food. It reaches its busiest point when everyone finally comes home. And it ends when the last person leaves and the kitchen becomes quiet again.

A holiday has a beginning. And it has an ending.

The Things I Really Want to Remember

Looking back at the day, I realized that the thing I want to remember most isn’t even the barbecue. I want to remember the crowded supermarket before the holiday. The line I stood in while buying shrimp. The little mountain of pomegranates in the fruit section. My daughter sitting beside her grandparents at lunch. Me standing alone in the kitchen, cleaning shrimp, cutting meat, and making skewers.

My husband lighting the charcoal when he came home. Everyone eating until we were completely full. And the moment around 9:30 p.m., when everyone had left and the house suddenly became quiet again.

Each of these moments is ordinary by itself. But put them together, and they become one Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival as it really happened in our family.

Not the Mid-Autumn Festival from a textbook. Not the Mid-Autumn Festival from a tourism advertisement. Just a real holiday, still quietly living in our everyday lives. And I wanted to record it.

Maybe This Is Why I Make Holiday Memory Pages

I used to think that recording a holiday meant saving the prettiest photographs.

The mooncakes. The full moon. The family photo. A beautiful table full of food. But over time, I’ve started wanting to record different things.

The crowded supermarket before the holiday. The grocery bags full of ingredients. The food that took several hours to prepare. Family members arriving from different places. The first skewer going onto the grill. Everyone eating too much. And that final hour spent cleaning the kitchen.

Because I’ve slowly realized that we’re not only recording a holiday. We’re recording what our family looked like in a particular year, at a particular stage of our lives. This year, my daughter was still sitting beside her grandparents. This year, my brother was still coming over to eat barbecue with us. This year, we were still standing in a supermarket line because we needed more shrimp for dinner. At the time, these things felt completely ordinary.

But a few years from now, our lives will be different. Our children will be older. Our parents will be older. Everyone’s routines will change. I may not remember exactly how many skewers we ate that night. I probably won’t remember everything we talked about.

But if I open this page again years from now, I hope I’ll remember this: The supermarket was crowded before the Mid-Autumn Festival. And on that day, our family came from different places and eventually found our way back to the same yard.

My Mid-Autumn Festival Memory Page

This is actually why I wanted to create a Mid-Autumn Festival Memories Page.

I wanted somewhere to record the little things while I could still remember them clearly. Not just the date. Not just what we ate. But the people who were there, the small details, the things that made this particular year different, and the moments that might otherwise disappear from memory. And if you look closely, you’ll notice that I added a tiny mooncake detail to the page.

I think that’s what I love about making printables. The Memories Page is actually just one piece of a bigger set I made called The Holidays Organizer, if a page like this is something you’d want for every holiday, not just this one. Sometimes a page doesn’t need to solve a huge problem. Sometimes it simply gives you a place to keep something that matters.

Because Every Year, the Festival Comes Back — But This Version of Us Only Happens Once

The Mid-Autumn Festival will come back next year. And the year after that. There will be another full moon. Another box of mooncakes. Another family meal. Another holiday.

But this particular version of our family will only exist once. This year, my daughter is this age. This year, our parents are this age. This year, my brother is still coming over for barbecue. This year, we stood in a crowded supermarket and waited for shrimp. This year, we came home from different places and ended up together in the same yard. Those things were ordinary while they were happening. But maybe that’s exactly why they are worth recording.

The festival comes back every year. But the people we are this year only appear once.

Happy Mid-Autumn Festival from our family to yours.

中秋节快乐！