Last friday, we celebrated a Moon Cake Festival at the office, courtesy of the Filipino-Chinese employees in our department. It started off with a free light dinner at around 5:30pm. There’s pork barbeque, lumpiang shanghai, pork siomai, pichi-pichi, pansit malabon, and pansit puti. By 6:15 the dice game started and i’m on table 12. Well, i’m pretty much lucky because from the first turn that i had, i always won a prize from the 4th, 5th, and 6th group consisting of food/snacks. I had a bottle of C2 apple, a box of chocolate mallows, a box of tiny chocolates, 2 gummy worms, a company ballpen, and a box of hello panda. Too bad i wasn’t that lucky enough to win prizes from the 1st, 2nd and 3rd group consisting of gadgets and appliances, hehe. But anyway, at least i enjoyed the night and went home with someone rather than nothing 
Here’s some tidbits about Moon Cakes and the Moon Cake Festival:
Mooncakes are Chinese pastry traditionally eaten during the Mid-Autumn Festival. Typical mooncakes are round or rectangular pastries, measuring about 10 cm in diameter and 4-5 cm thick. A thick filling usually made from lotus seed paste is surrounded by a relatively thin (2-3 mm) crust and may contain yolks from salted duck eggs. Mooncakes are rich, heavy, and dense compared with most Western cakes and pastries. They are usually eaten in small wedges accompanied by Chinese tea.
The Mid-Autumn Festival, also known as the Moon Festival, or in Chinese, Zhongqiu Jie, is a popular harvest festival celebrated by Chinese people and Vietnamese people (even though they celebrate it differently), dating back over 3,000 years to moon worship in China’s Shang Dynasty. It was first called Zhongqiu Jie (literally “Mid-Autumn Festival”) in the Zhou Dynasty. In Malaysia and Singapore, it is also sometimes referred to as the Lantern Festival or Mooncake Festival. The Mid-Autumn Festival is held on the 15th day of the eighth month in the Chinese calendar, which is usually around mid or late September in the Gregorian calendar. It is a date that parallels the autumn and spring Equinoxes of the solar calendar. The traditional food of this festival is the mooncake, of which there are many different varieties.
The Moon Cake Festival also is a time for friends and family to get together, enjoy sumptuous meals and play the MoonCake Dice Game. All the game requires are six dice and a china bowl. Just throw the dice into the bowl – and the different combination you get stand for different ranks of awards you will win. The game has six ranks of awards, which are named as the winners in ancient imperial examinations, and has 63 different sized mooncakes as prizes. But due to practical reasons, most Chinoys use toys, household items, school supplies, chocolates, chips or money as prizes. The magic number in this game is the number 4 “the red four”. It is believed that the winner will be very lucky in the coming year.
*the prizes i won..
