Beside Mooncake, Mid autumn festival is indicated by lantern festival which is celebrated in welcoming the moon. Same as the moon cakes, lantern festival is enjoyed with people we love especially family and friends.

Description

Raise the lanterns at the scenic grounds of the Chinese Garden in this annual traditional festival called Mid autumn festival. The programme includes traditional cultural performances and mesmerising displays of bright and colourful lanterns.

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Make your own chinese lantern
Materials:
colored paper
string
markers, crayons, or paints
decorating things, like stickers or glitter
scissors
tape
a hole punch or a sharp pencil

Directions:

1. Take a sheet of colored paper. Draw small shapes, like stars, moons or circles on it. Make any shapes you like. Remember, the big piece of paper is the important one, not the shapes. Push the scissors through the middle of a shape and then cut it out.
Remember, just cut out the shapes. Don’t cut anyplace else on the big paper.
2. Decorate the piece of paper with pictures or writing. Draw or write on the paper to decorate it. You can also glue things to the paper to make it pretty.

3. Get the tape. Roll the piece of paper to make a tube. Don’t make it too tight.
Make sure that your decorations are on the outside to that everyone can see them.
Tape the ends of the paper to each other to make the tube.

4. Get the hole-punch and the string. Punch four holes at the top of the tube. Cut four pieces of string as long as the tube. Tie one piece of string to each hole. Tie the four strings together. Cut another piece of string and tie it to the other strings so you can hang up the lantern.

5. If you know any riddles, write one on a piece of paper. Tape it to your lantern.
Let your friends try to guess the answer. If you have some candy, you can give a piece to the friend who solves your riddle!

Source : http://kevdesign.com/midautumnfestival/lanternrelated.htm

If Chinese people are celebrating Mid autumn festival with Mooncake (see more of Moon cakes), on April in Australia, the mid-autumn with temperatures starting their slide into winter. Even so, in most of Australia the average temperature would still be in the 20°-30°C (68°-86°F) range.

The colder areas would include Tasmania in the south with an average temperature below 15°C (59°F) in Hobart. The warmer areas would be the tropical north where averages could remain in the 30°sC (86°sF). These are averages, of course, so expect the temperature range to be higher in the early afternoon and much cooler after midnight.

Note that Australian temperatures do fluctuate and there have lately been some weather surprises, whether as a result of global warming or some other climatic factor.

Rainfall would be sparse in Alice Springs, Adelaide, Canberra, Hobart, Melbourne and Perth, and heavy in Cairns

Anzac Day
The major fixed-date event in April is Anzac Day on April 25 which is marked throughout the country with dawn services, wreath-laying, parades or a combination of these.

The national focal point of Anzac Day commemorations is the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.

Expect dawn services and parades in cities and major towns. Sydney holds a dawn service at the Cenotaph in Martin Place and a parade through George St which then turns toward Hyde Park where the Anzac Memorial stands.

Easter events
Moveable holidays would include Holy Week and Easter which could occur in March or April.

Moving along with the Easter holidays would be Sydney’s Royal Easter Show.

During the Easter weekend, Byron Bay holds the Eastern Roots & Blues Festival at Red Devil Park. Blues, reggae and roots pop are complemented with alternative country, hip hop, soul, world and rock genres.

April in history
* Queen Elizabeth II, Queen of Australia, was born on April 21, 1926. Despite April 21 being her actual birthday, the Queen’s Birthday holiday is celebrated in June in Australia, except in Western Australia where it is celebrated in late September or early October. The Queen was born Elizabeth Alexandra Mary of England’s House of Windsor.

Mid-Autumn Events and Celebrations

* On April 28, 1770, English explorer Captain James Cook arrived on the Endeavour at Australia’s Botany Bay. This first landing on Australian soil by the English explorer led to his claiming Australia for the English Crown, although the first English settlement at Sydney Cove was to come 18 years later.

Source : http://goaustralia.about.com/od/discoveraustralia/a/ausapril.htm

New Year has become one of the famous celebration every year.

New Year’s Eve
New Year’s Eve is the day for people to eat, drink, entertain and enjoy themselves. To celebrate the New Year, the northerners have ‘jiaozi’ and the southerners make ‘niangao’ (New Year cakes). ‘Jiaozi’ is shaped like shoe-shaped gold or silver ingot, used as money in feudal China, while the Chinese characters ‘niangao’ is the homophone of ‘High Year’, meaning getting better year by year”. So both ‘jiaozi’ and ‘niangao’ are good .

On New Year’s Eve , all the family sit round the table, enjoying the “New Year’s Eve dinner”, representing a happy family reunion. At dinner, the fish must not be eaten, for the Chinese character fish is the homophone of “surplus”, meaning we have surplus fortune every year. So ‘fish’ symbols the ‘luck and wealth’ of the coming year. Fish on the dinner table is not a dish, but a decoration for the sake of good luck and fortune.

Celebrated Activities
To pay a New Year visit is an important event during the Spring Festival. In olden times, high-ranking officials would go to the court to wish the emperor a Happy New Year. The entire clan would hold a ceremony. However, the most frequent visits were those between relatives and friends. This activity would continue for several days.

Beginning in the Song Dynasty in the tenth century,people began to send cards to express a New Year’s greeting. At first, the sending of New Year’s cards was limited to the circle of people in high positions. So it was also a way to show off one’s social status. However, at the beginning of the Ming Dynasty in the 14th century, ordinary people also began to exchange cards. The practice continues today during the Spring Festival.

As for recreational activities duning the Sping Festival, we can use two words to summar-ize:various and colorful. The Dragon Dance and Lion Dance are traditionally performed during the festival. The dances do not have to be performed during the festival. The dances do not have to be performed by professionals. Sometimes the perfomers are famers, street vendors or craftsmen.

Walking on stilts is another traditional perfomance-event popular in China, especially in the northern part of the country. According to the archives,our Chinese ancestors began using stilts to help them gather fruits from trees. This practical use of stilts gradually developed into a kind of folk dance. Today’s skillful perfomers can perform truly amazing feats and extremely difficult movements on stilts .The professionals even put on dramas while walking about on stilts.

If you are not a stilt-walker yourself, or can not do a dragon or lion dance, never mind! During Spring Fesstival time, you can go to temple fairs and enjoy superbperformances of the dances, stilt-walking and amazing acrobatic shows. You can also try and enjoy the many varieties of local snack foods.

Nowadays, most people in China’s rural areas still hold to these traditional celebrations, However, as the bace of life continues to quicken in the cities, urban residents have taken up new ways to celebrate the Chinese traditional New Year. For example, many city dwellers no longer bother to send out greeting cards. Instead, they use the telephone or pagers to convey greetings to relatives and friends.To travel during the New Year holidays is another fashionable trend.And whatshould be mentioned, too, is that for safety reason, firecrackers were banned in some large cities of China a few years ago, making the occasion much quieter than before.

It seems that all our traditions are facing new challenges. Maybe when the children of the next generation grow up, they can only leam about Chinese traditions from books.

Source : http://www.chinavoc.com/festivals/spring/springf04.htm#eve

See Also : Mid autumn festival, Mooncake, Moon cakes