Why Are We Celebrating Autumn?

 

Please get this right. We have no seasons in Singapore.  It is either,  hot, humid, rainy or the governmental elections season.  However, Singaporeans will always find a reason to celebrate regardless of occasion and season.  When our friends in the Northern hemisphere celebrate a winter white Christmas, I found it quite amusing that one of the local malls would be decked out in Christmas decoration with glitter-dusted cardboard cut-out snowflakes hanging all across the ceiling.  Furthermore, a giant inflatable snowman would sit outside the mall’s entrance, next to a snow machine that pumps out real snow.  I often found that odd and hoped that no small kids were mentally impacted by this ludicrous picture of a snowman and real snow in the tropics.

This month, we would be celebrating Autumn.  I knew Autumn was at our hot and humid doorstep when I could not find nice dresses in the shops.  The clothes racks at every shop were filled with fur-lined, fur-collared, quilted and woolly things. When I had decided to comfort myself by browsing for nice sandals at the shoe shop, I was dismayed to find boots of different lengths and colours lined up at the shop window…some even were fur-lined. For goodness sakes, we are in the tropics!

Tomorrow, Chinese all over the world will be celebrating the Mid-Autumn festival with Mooncakes and colourful lanterns.  I was not even sure when Autumn began in Singapore, yet we would be celebrating mid-Autumn tomorrow.  I started surfing the internet for more information about the Mid-Autumn festival last week.  It was part of my commitment to revisit my Chinese roots, if you remembered my last blog post athttp://thecrazyangmoandhisangrywife.blogspot.com/2013/09/going-back-to-my-chinese-roots.html

My research uncovered that the Mid-Autumn festival was surrounded by ancient myths.  One version of the myth was that in ancient China, there was an archer called Hou Yi who successfully shot down  9 out of the 10 suns that appeared in the sky to scorch and destroy the land.  He left only 1 sun in existence to provide light and life, not allowing the earth to fall into darkness.  Celebrated for his prowess, he became King and married the lady Chang Er.  Over time, Hou Yi became a despot obsessed about continuing his rule by searching for an elixir.  This elixir promised eternal life.  When the elixir was found,  Chang Er decided to consume it instead in a bid to prevent her husband from continuing his despotic rule forever.  She then transformed into a fairy and flew to the Moon on which she lived.    The grateful people on earth lighted their lanterns on earth so that Chang Er could see them from the moon.  That is why today, the Chinese hang lanterns around their homes during this festival.    Hou Yi grieved for his beloved wife so he put out a table of offerings of cakes and sweets to honour her every Autumn.  Today, the Chinese consumed moon-shaped cakes with the same intent to honor her.   To find out more about Chang Er, do read it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang%27e .  

The Mid-Autumn festival was always a wonderful gathering of family members enjoying Mooncakes and sipping tea under the light of the full moon, while children carried lanterns and ran across the garden.  Sometimes, if you were lucky, you might hear a scream from the kitchen when a child’s lantern caught fire and his or her mother came running with a kettle of water to put the fire out.  Often the mother and her visibly shaken child would be okay, but it was totally hilarious for the rest of us peering from the other side of the fence.

Mum will be cooking up a storm to celebrate the Mid-Autumn festival tomorrow.  Our dessert would be the ubiquitous Mooncakes in different flavours.  I personally liked the ice-cream Mooncakes, but Mum thought it was an abomination to the Chinese culture.  She did not rate the chocolate, truffle-filled and lychee martini ones either, and thought they were too ”angmo” for her.  So I had decided to get my own Mooncakes – Hello Kitty ones.  I even got a Hello Kitty lantern to match.

Mum saw festivals like these as an opportunity to gather as a family.  I saw them as an opportunity to relive the memories of my childhood.  Autumn was not about the weather becoming colder, the leaves turning from green to a rusty gold and certainly not about the calorie-laden Mooncakes.  It was a season that celebrated my childhood, and I knew every year that when Mid-Autumn festival came around, it would not be too long before  the “cold-wintry-white” season of Christmas would arrive.  That was yet another wonderful opportunity to relive my childhood memories.


About the writer:
The writer of this blog post is a 44 year old mother of one, who spreads her time between her day job as a marketing professional at a financial institution, her hobby as a certified professional tarot reader and numerologist, and her family which includes a 19 year old son and 3 dogs with personality disorders.  She's married to a Scot who has been affectionately called "The Crazy AngMo" and prays that he does not find out that the term when translated, has labeled him as a "Ginger Head".   Together, we create a home made up with more nuts than a fruitcake but filled with plenty of love.

Hello Kitty Mooncakes.  Too cute.  They came packaged in this Hello Kitty bag.

Hello Kitty lantern.  Super cute.

Nothing Is Ever What It Seems

More Than Two Sides To A Coin

In the past month, I learnt so much about the fragility of graciousness and civility in a society full of educated and talented people.  However I refused to believe that there was only one party who was culprit to the disintegration of social graces, tolerance, good manners and good sense.

Paula Deen In The Frying Pan

Half a world away, I had witnessed cooking show host and food author Paula Deen’s massive empire crumbling before her as stories about her using racial slurs raged through social media.  The self-proclaimed “Queen of Butter” who often served a heart attack on a plate, almost gave me a heart attack without her cooking when she claimed these racial slurs used were “a joke” and was only in “a single incident”.  I abhor bigotry.  Discrimination of any kind, racial, cultural, or sexual should never be condoned. However, while accusatory fingers wagged at her, I was appalled that this unacceptable behavior was left unchecked for so long.  It saddened me to think that this racial discrimination had been left unchecked for a long time due to her commercial value to stakeholders profiting from her popularity, and was only brought to the surface because she “pissed” the daylights out of someone hell-bent on spoiling her day in retaliation.


Hello Kitty Goodbye Sensible Behavior

Closer to home, I had witnessed adults in Singapore, embroiled in very public displays of irrational tirades against the McDonald’s restaurant crew just because they failed to get their hands on the Hello Kitty plushies. Videos of these incidents were circulating virally across social media too.  Funnily, just a few years ago, a similar scene played out in the newspapers which reported that customers who queued for Hello Kitty plushies at a McDonald’s restaurant were hurt when a glass panel broke during the mad rush for these toys.  Again, it saddened me to think that these public displays of irrational behavior could long be forgiven and forgotten since the last incident because of the commercial gains seen from both sides of the coin from either the sale of 1) Hello Kitty plushies on ebay and 2) the sale of more McDonald’s Value Meals.

Masking Fundamental Issues

When our city was blanketed in haze due to illegal practices of forest-clearing in Sumatra, Indonesia, I had witnessed long queues of irate Singaporeans rushing to buy N95 masks at supermarkets and hospital pharmacies.  This was not without incident too as I spotted a video virally circulating across social media depicting a man snatching a pack of N95 masks off a lady shopper’s grocery basket, then challenging her with this remark, “Stop me if you can.”  This man was lucky that I wasn’t that lady shopper, or that video would have ended with a footage of him frantically searching for his testicles in the bin then.

That brought me to have a think about the fundamental issue of unpreparedness.  I could not understand how the establishment could be unprepared for this outcome when the illegal “slash and clear” practices in the Sumatran forests had been happening for so many years.  Again, it saddened me to think that as the environment came under siege with the forest fires that had been on-going for years, nothing was done because of the commercial gains from the big corporations who profit from it.  These corporations that came under scrutiny due to the forest fires, were known to be linked to the establishment…not just ours, but our neighbors’ as well.

Read In Between The Lines

So as the newspapers, my Facebook wall and my Twitter feeds are filled with stories everyday about unpleasant behaviors like the ones I had recounted in this post, horrific incidents like the floods in India, important milestones in gay rights like the death of DOMA in the US ( Defense of Marriage Act) and unimportant milestones like naming a celebrity’s baby North West, I continue to read in between the lines so that I could form an objective assessment to these issues. I trained Joel to do the same so that he could grow up with the notion that nothing in this world is black and white. 

Even when I read the Tarot for my clients, I had always approached these readings with an objective view knowing that my intuition will always guide me to understand that there's more than meets the eye to the clients' issues.

An ex-boss once said to me, “Nothing is ever what it seems”.

About the writer:

The writer of this blog post is a 43 year old mother of one, who spreads her time between her day job as a marketeer at a financial institution, her hobby as a certified professional tarot reader and numerologist, and her family which includes a 19 year old son.  She's married to a Scot who has been affectionately called "The Crazy AngMo" and prays that he does not find out that the term when translated, has labeled him as a "Ginger Head".

Mum Must Love Hello Kitty Too

Mothers’ Day Mania

I know Mothers’ Day is traditionally a day most mothers would blog to death about how wonderful it was to be a mother.  I know because I was one of them gushing about my son’s home-made card.  When I logged on to Facebook, my entire wall was filled with friends’ pictures in all manner of poses, with their kids and their Mothers’ Day presents.  I even knew what they had for Mothers’ Day lunch or dinner because they posted pictures of their scrumptious meals.  My single friends were not left out of the celebrations too.  They fancied themselves as “mothers” to their pets and posted pictures of themselves and their pets, some of them had their dogs wearing clothes with the words “I love Mom” printed on it.

My own Facebook timeline was also shamelessly plastered with posts about Joel’s home-made Mother’s Day card and everything else “mother-related” that is worth cooing about.

What I was not prepared for was Mum’s Mothers’ Day gift to me though.  While the words in Joel’s card brought a tear to my eye, the intent and efforts behind Mum’s gift made me break down in uncontrollable sobs.   

Mum’s Hello Kitty Prezzie

What was the gift?  It was a collection of 10 Hello Kitty collectible figurines.  Ever since I came out of the closet as a Hello Kitty fan, I had my colleagues, my husband, my son, my friends and now my Mum, plying me with many Hello Kitty gifts ranging from a Hello Kitty hairdryer, a Hello Kitty weighing scale, Hello Kitty bed covers, Hello Kitty dolls, Hello Kitty kitchen utensils including a frying pan, a pancake pan ( *hint* I don’t have a Hello Kitty toaster) as well as Hello Kitty crockery and kitchen utensils. My bathroom is filled with Hello Kitty bathroom accessories.  Even David is currently using Hello Kitty bath towels, shampoo and shower gel.  The family had to eat dinner off Hello Kitty plates, bowls and utensils.

I have to stress though that the set of 10 Hello Kitty collectibles were so precious to me, not because they were Hello Kitty collectibles, but because of the effort it took for Mum to collect all of them.

Hello Kitty Tokidoki Promotion

Our local grocery store 7-11 launched a Hello Kitty Tokidoki promotion for about 2 months.  I was a little hazy about the mechanics of the promotion but from whatever little I knew, this was what Mum had to do to get a collectible figurine in a specific design.  She had to spend $4 to get 1 stamp.  Every 6 stamps ($24 worth of products bought) and an additional cost of $3.90 would entitle her to 1 figurine.  She collected all 10 figurines over a 2-month period which meant that she could have spent $280 or more on groceries like bread, eggs, and milk. 

Mum Would Do Anything For Me

One thing was certain.  She must have visited 7-11 on a daily basis for 2 months, collected a shoe-box full of stamps and consumed a truck load of bread, eggs and milk just so her loopy daughter could get a full set of 10 collectible Hello Kitty figurines. 

Mum spoiled me way too much.  This was truly a gesture of Mother’s love.  I would have done the same for Joel, but I would have been suspicious if Joel had asked me to consume $280 worth of bread, milk and eggs to obtain his collection of Hello Kitty collectible figurines.  Perhaps next time when they have a Transformers promotion, I might do the same then.

Yes Mum truly spoiled me silly.  She spoiled me by cooking my favorite dishes when I visited her.  Even when I haven’t had the time to visit her, she would whip up these dishes, and showed up at my doorstep carrying bags of Tupperware filled with a huge amount of food, which was enough to sustain a town in the event of a natural disaster of seismic proportion. 

She spoiled me by boiling soup and preparing her “witches’ brew” of Chinese traditional herbal medicines when I was ill, believing that Western medicines were detrimental to my liver and my brain.  I still have not been able to convince her that it was too late; my liver was malfunctioning due to the copious amount of beers I enjoyed when I was younger, and my brain was, well, loopy as the years had gone by - incurable.

I Love My Mum

I love my Mum.  I am so grateful that I have her in my life even though we get on each other’s nerves often. David said that it was because we were both “2 peas in the pod”, I could not figure out how that was so when I did not spot a tight curly perm.

I appreciate her presence more than anything.  A colleague told me that when she saw my Hello Kitty figurines sitting in a row by my desk, it made her teary because she missed her Mum who was no longer with her.  I would not know what to do with my life without Mum. 

That is why I feel so blessed.  Mum’s gift to me was worth more than anything money could ever buy. 

About the writer:

The writer of this blog post is a 43 year old mother of one, who spreads her time between her day job as a marketeer at a financial institution, her hobby as a certified professional tarot reader and numerologist, and her family which includes a 19 year old son.  She's married to a Scot who has been affectionately called "The Crazy AngMo" and prays that he does not find out that the term when translated, has labeled him as a "Ginger Head".