lantern festival

today is the chinese’s 15th day of the 8th month, which is the mid autumn festival or also known as mooncake festival or lantern festival.

like the durians, i never eat mooncake at all. don’t like it at all despite the many types that are now available.

as it is the lantern festival, here i would like to share an article i wrote many years back to the defunct malaysian post magazine.

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THE Lantern Festival brought back memories I had with my two brothers and sister.

As our parents were poor, they couldn’t afford to buy us lanterns. So we made our own by using empty milk tins. We made a hole on each side of a tin and used a string to thread in the two holes. Then we tied a stick to hold up the tin with a candle and – viola! -we had a lantern! For a bigger lantern, we would use Nespray or Milo tins.

My brothers, sister, a few of the neigh-bourhood kids (some of them with real lanterns, some with ‘tin’ lanterns like ours) and I would then parade round the village in a procession. My eldest brother once had a Milo tin lan-tern. Since the tin was higher than a candle, he put in four candles to make his lantern brighter.

To make the lantern procession more enjoy-able, we beat the tin lanterns with a stick to create a din. The noisier, the more fun was our philosophy. The adults would scold us for making such a racket, but some would be amused and cheer us on.

Seeing the fun we had, the children with real lanterns would of-fer to exchange their lanterns with our tin lanterns Since we wanted to have a feel of a real lantern, we would com-ply with their wish but not for long because we itched to beat our spe-cial drums cum lan-terns.

When our parents could afford to buy us lanterns, we did not make anymore ‘tin’ lan-terns. However, I will never forget those wonderful moments when our drums cum lanterns made such a racket in the neighbourhood that sometimes even the dogs howled in protest.

LUCIA LAI
Malaysian Post
21 September 1999

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happy lantern festival to all!