Mid-Autumn festival off time

Happy Moon-cake day ^^

Taobaospree staff will enjoy mid-autumn holiday from 22th-24th Sep, then 25th work again (:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Autumn_Festival

For other harvest festivals that may be known as Mid-Autumn Festival, see Mid-Autumn Festival (disambiguation).

Mid-Autumn Festival
The Mid-Autumn Moon Festival is also celebrated in Chinese communities such as the San Francisco Chinatown.
Chinese name
Traditional Chinese	中秋節
Simplified Chinese	中秋节
Min name
Chinese	八月節
Vietnamese name
Quốc ngữ	Tết Trung Thu
Chữ nôm	節中秋

Mid-Autumn Festival celebrations in Victoria Park, Hong Kong

Mooncakes are often eaten during the festival.

Mid-Autumn Festival at the Botanical Garden, Montreal

The Mid-Autumn Festival, also known as the Moon Festival, Zhongqiu Festival, or in Chinese, Zhongqiujie(traditional Chinese:中秋節), or in Vietnamese "Tết Trung Thu", is a popular harvest festival celebrated by Chinese and Vietnamese people, dating back over 3,000 years to moon worship in China's Shang Dynasty. It was first calledZhongqiu Jie(literally "Mid-Autumn Festival") in the Zhou Dynasty.^[1] In Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines, it is also sometimes referred to as theLantern FestivalorMooncake Festival.

The Mid-Autumn Festival is held on the 15th day of the eighth month in the Chinese calendar, which is usually around late September or early October in the Gregorian calendar. It is a date that parallels the autumnal equinox of the solar calendar, when the moon is supposedly at its fullest and roundest. The traditional food of this festival is the mooncake, of which there are many different varieties.

The Mid-Autumn Festival is one of the few most important holidays in the Chinese calendar, the others being Chinese New Year and Winter Solstice, and is a legal holiday in several countries. Farmers celebrate the end of the summer harvesting season on this date. Traditionally on this day, Chinese family members and friends will gather to admire the bright mid-autumn harvest moon, and eat moon cakes and pomelos under the moon together. Accompanying the celebration, there are additional cultural or regional customs, such as:

• Putting pomelo rinds on one's head
• Carrying brightly lit lanterns, lighting lanterns on towers, floating sky lanterns
• Burning incense in reverence to deities including Chang'e(Chinese:嫦娥; pinyin:Cháng'é)
• Planting Mid-Autumn trees
• Collecting dandelion leaves and distributing them evenly among family members
• Fire Dragon Dances
• In Taiwan, since the 1980s, barbecuing meat outdoors has become a widespread way to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival.^[2][3]

Shops selling mooncakes before the festival often display pictures of Chang'e floating to the moon.