Mid-Autumn Festival

Organizer: Church of the Holy Family Kajang; My Role: Program Director

I was serving at the Chinese Language Apostolate Commission of the Holy Family Church. Every year, our group organizes two cultural festivals that bring people from the community together during Chinese New Year and Mid-Autumn Festival. It was my distinct pleasure to serve as the Program Director for these events that promote unity.

Mid-Autumn Festival is celebrated on the 15th day of the eighth month of the Chinese Lunar calendar. Similar to the Chinese New Year, it is also a festival where Chinese people gather. Our group envisions our community as a big spiritual family, and organizing a mid-autumn festival in this community provides an opportunity for our members to integrate.

It is worth highlighting that although this annual event is Chinese-culture oriented, it has been consistently welcoming of many non-Chinese from our community to attend. Our group greatly values diversity, and we are proud of our strength to integrate people of different cultures and languages to celebrate this festival together.

A large number of crowd with different languages and races who attended mid-autumn festival

A group photo with some committee members, volunteers and performers at the stage after the event

Buffer dinner, which consists of a variety of food, served in a pot-luck manner during the celebration

A group photo with the parish priests and some of their international guests who attended the event

The Event Program

Our group usually organizes this event in a pot-luck manner since we are confident that our community is generous enough to prepare and share their home-cooked unique food. To encourage integration, the admission for this event is free. In addition, the attendees can experience various interesting entertainment such as cultural dance, song performance, and instrumental shows. Besides performances, this event also normally offers game competitions, lantern design competition, lantern procession, and lucky draws!

Games and fellowship during the event

Lentern procession during the event

Chinese traditional dance by children

Band performance with street dance

Giving lucky draw present to a participant

Various lucky draw presents were prepared

Children was performing by singing in a choir

As the program director, it was also one of my goals to explore different talents in my community and create performance opportunities for them in such a wonderful event. I have coached and joined different youth and adult musicians who have not worked together before to offer a performance for this event. Furthermore, I have guided children in choir singing to allow them to offer their singing talents by doing a stage performance. There is always mutual benefit in creating performance opportunities - the performers identified their talents, and the crowd get entertained.

Besides performers, this event also allowed me to identify other talents in photography, emceeing, game coordination, etc. It is also equally important for me to discover more talented people who were more comfortable to work behind the scenes such as audio-visual support, decoration, food supply, etc. In other words, this celebration does not just provide an opportunity for reunion, integration and entertainment, it also creates platforms for many people to discover, strengthen and utilize their talents.

Lantern Design Competition

The program also has a competition for those who are interested in art and craft work to design their own hand-made lanterns. Our group normally imposes an environmental-friendly theme for this competition, i.e. participants were challenged to utilize recyclable materials to create their lanterns. By having this competition, I was also able to discover people with talents in art and creativity in my community.

Various lenterns designed by the participants of the mid-autumn festival