The Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋节 zhōngqiūjié), also known as the Moon Festival, is a popular celebration of abundance and togetherness, dating back over 3,000 years to China’s Zhou Dynasty. This day is also considered a harvest festival since fruits, vegetables and grain have been harvested by this time and food is abundant.The Mid-Autumn Festival falls on the 15th day of the 8th lunar month of the Chinese calendar (usually around mid- or late-September in the Gregorian calendar), a date that parallels the Autumn Equinox of the solar calendar. This is the ideal time, when the moon is at its fullest and brightest, to celebrate the abundance of the summer’s harvest. In 2007, the mid-autumn festival falls on September 25.

In the Chinese lunar calendar tradition, the seventh, eighth and ninth months comprise autumn. During fall, the weather is getting drier, and the skies are commonly clear and cloudless and the nights crisp and sharp. Thus the festival celebrates the moon’s appearance as the brightest and most beautiful throughout the year.

The traditional food of this festival is the mooncake. Mooncakes are typically round, symbolizing the full round moon of the mid-autumn festival. The round mooncakes, measuring about three inches in diameter and one and a half inches in thickness are made with melon seeds, lotus seeds, almonds, minced meats, bean paste, orange peels and lard. A golden yolk from a salted duck egg was placed at the center of each cake, and the golden brown crust was decorated with symbols of the festival. The picture above shows a typical mooncake and its inner and outer packages.

Nowadays there are many different varieties of mooncakes, and there are even square-shaped ones. Last month, a super large mooncake was made in Shenyang, Liaoning, weighing nearly 13 tons. This mooncake is 8.15 meters in diameter and 20 centimeters in height, and has a coating weighing one ton, and filling weighing 12 tons, and took ten chefs more than 10 hours to make it.

The Mid-Autumn Festival is one of the two most important holidays in the Chinese calendar, and the other being the Chinese Lunar New Year.

以下是部分关于“文化”的中、英文词汇对照，其中有些也是跨文化交流理论和心理学理论中的概念。罗列于此，谨供参考。

• cultural 文化的
• cultural adaptation 文化适应
• cultural adhesion 文化信奉
• cultural advantage 文化优势
• cultural anthropology 文化人类学
• cultural artifact 文化产品
• cultural assimilation 文化训练
• cultural assimilator 同化训练
• cultural attitude 文化态度
• cultural changes 文化变化
• cultural conditioning 文化条件作用
• cultural configuration 文化全貌
• cultural conflict 文化冲突
• cultural conserve 文化固定性
• cultural context 文化环境
• cultural convergence 文化汇合
• cultural cycle 文化轮回
• cultural deprivation 文化剥夺
• cultural determinism 文化决定论
• cultural difference 文化差异
• cultural diffusion 文化传播
• cultural disadvantage 文化劣势
• cultural drift 文化趋势
• cultural drift hypothesis 文化流布假设
• cultural ecology 文化生态学
• cultural education 文化教育
• cultural emic concept 文化特有概念
• cultural ethos 文化气质
• cultural etic concept 文化共同概念
• cultural evolution 文化演变
• cultural focus 文化焦点
• cultural framework 文化构架
• cultural gradient 文化渐进度
• cultural growth 文化生产
• cultural identity 文化认同
• cultural inertia 文化惰性
• cultural integration 文化整合
• cultural island 文化孤岛
• cultural lag 文化落后
• cultural norm 文化常模
• cultural norm 文化规范
• cultural parallelism 文化并行论
• cultural pattern 文化模式
• cultural process 文化作用
• cultural psychiatry 文化精神病学
• cultural relativism 文化相对论
• cultural resemblance 文化类似
• cultural science psychology 社会科学心理学
• cultural sociology 文化社会学
• cultural speech 文化言语
• cultural supersystem 文化超系统
• cultural test bias 文化测验偏差
• cultural traits 文化特质
• cultural transmission 文化传递
• cultural tyranny 文化专制主义
• culturally deprived children 文化剥夺儿童
• culturally disadvantaged children 文化处境不利儿童
• cultural historical psychology 文化历史心理学

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Via Yahoo: After ten years of service with distinction as President and Chief Executive Officer of AFS Intercultural Programs/USA, Alex J. Plinio will retire on December 31, 2007. The Board of Directors is pleased to announce that after an extensive search and interview process including candidates in academia, diplomacy, not-for-profits, business and other sectors, Margaret Crotty has been selected as the next President and CEO of AFS-USA.