Preparing Lanterns Illuminating All-Night-Long

As with previous years, I always go back to my hometown to celebrate this Festival with my family. Lantern festival or popularly known as the mid-autumn/mooncake festival is one of the greatest celebration amongst the Chinese community in Malaysia. Don't ask me what's lantern got to do with this festival. As far as I can remember a Chinese friend of mine mentioned that the people in their country only "play" lantern during the 15th day of the first lunar month*Chap Goh Meh* and not during the mid autumn festival. Anyway, this is what make this multi-racial country unique as I saw some of our non-Chinese neighbourhood kids also joined the cheer by playing lanterns.
I reckon it is easier to instill a culture or tradition amongst the new aged generations by associating festivals with food or things that they like. Undoubtedly, this is one of my favourite festival..hehehe..just the thought of all my favourite mooncakes will make me drool!!

Since young, we enjoyed lighting up lanterns and hang them up on branches of the trees in our garden. Ever since Ikea came to operate their biz in Malaysia, we had this great tip which we would recommend for anyone who enjoy lighting up lanterns as much as we do. There was both joy and pain in the process of lighting the lantern up. While there are LED lanterns in the market today, we still prefer the small colourful paper lanterns with the warm candle light. Once upon a time we kids were very frustrated when our little paper lanterns got burnt or when the candle easily burned out. All night long we will be very busy watching the lights and to get the candle replaced when the light went off. This was really no fun. When we were not careful enough, the whole lantern get burned. Thank God.. this is no longer an issue now that we have discovered the cheap unscented aromatherapy candles from Ikea which are great replacement for the traditional candle sticks. Below is the tip of preparing a lantern which the light is long-lasting up to 6 hours:-

My cousin's homemade jelly mooncakes

Yam paste mooncake from Dim Sum shop at Nilai