In My Country, We Have a Different Kind of New Year S Celebration After the First Full

Full Moon

In my country, we have a different kind of New Year’s celebration after the first full moon of the year. We have to eat five grains of rice with nine different vegetables, and sometimes we visit our next door neighbor. You have to eat all of this to make you stay healthy the whole year. You eat the next neighbor’s meal because it is a different nutrition that you didn’t have at your home.

On the first full moon night, we can stay up as late as we want. We play and eat and play again. When I was young, my mom made all kinds of snacks and it was fun. We took advantage from the brightness of the full moon.

Part of our first full moon experiences were skating and watching fireworks. We didn’t have fancy skating rinks or fireworks. We made fireworks with an empty can with a hole on the bottom. We would find wood sticks to put in the can to make a fire and swing the can around. It looked like a sparkler that we use here in the United States. This was the only day that we could play with fire in the rice fields. We had so much fun under the full moon and with all the nature surrounding us.

When I was growing up, we had a lot of mystery stories about the full moon, especially the first full moon of the year. We would make a wish to the moon to make us rich. We imagined a lot about what the inside of the moon was like. We thought that the inside had two rabbits living in there and they would make rice cakes like we did. We had so many different thoughts and images of what was inside that full moon. Oftentimes, we would make up our own stories and tell them to each other. We always had a lot of fun and laughed when we had a full moon.

I feel bad for this generation of children. They don’t have their own imagination and outside adventures that allow them to discover new things. The computer does the research and discovery for them. When I was young, we did our own research and found things for ourselves. I am glad to have computers for science and things, but they take away the mystery of the moon and the imagination of the child.

I miss those old times and as I think back on those times, I have good memories and only wish that the children of today could have the same experiences of the first full moon that I did when I was a child.