Mooncake festival game

The mooncake festival game is big in our office. The company provides us with the mooncakes which we use to play the mooncake game plus the “Big boss” gave us money (more than P10K) for our prizes in kind. The girls shopped for the prizes, mostly grocery items but this time, they also included “KIKAY items”, that was Jane’s term for the beauty items they bought like powder, face cleansers…what else? (It was a pack but I did not get any since I am not really a kikay…hehehe). The new girls really were excited when they would get such pack!

Actually, we don’t really look forward to the festival but more on the game! The festival is a Chinese festival also known as the mid-autumn festival. It is celebrated when the full moon is as its brightest which is on the 15th day of the 8th month of the Chinese calendar. Though it is a fixed date for them since they follow the moon cycle, it would fall on different dates on our normal calendar but it usually falls on September. So comes August, people in our department would already be asking when it will be. Nobody really knows how the practice of eating mooncake on the mid-autumn festival started but many attributes it to a successful revolt that happened in China through the use of mooncakes.

Since many officers in my company are Filchinese or Chinoys, I have already received real mooncakes from some which is a special kind of sweet cake in the shape of a moon and filled with sesame seeds, ground lotus seeds and the yellow of a duck’s egg. We don’t actually use those cakes for the game since that would be really expensive! Instead, we buy HOPIA from Holland Hopia Factory. It is also a sweet cake with Chinese mark on top but only contains mung been for the filling. They have a box intended for the game, wherein there are different sizes of hopia depending of which prize you are going to win based on the combination of the dice you throw. The box has a packet which also contains the 6 dice and the instruction for the game.

All the people from the other departments had their mooncake game last Thursday, some even had appliances for their prizes (our department always choose lesser prizes so that everybody would have something). We had ours today since my boss was not free yesterday since she also had to play with another group. She is really an expert in the game since she handles it for a lot of people!

Playing the game is really noisy since you shout everytime you get a combination that has a corresponding price plus the others also shout and laugh a bit when you don't get a prize! The main prize is not taken immediately since your winning combination could be beaten by others so that you wait till the game is finished. There were 4 main prizes for our games (since we had so short a time to play it and my boss decided to just had one round and include all the prizes.. we can’t play long since she had to leave early plus we would create too much noise for the other departments). So anyway, I got the wining dice combination 5 times which is not really easy…but the combination I got was lower than my first and you retain the last combination you threw. In the end, I got dislodged from the 4-prizes when Weng threw a combination of 6 fives! Well, she had been having bad throws throughout our game and when she finally got it we shouted and embraced. She said sorry when she realized I got dislodged but i told her it was okay what is more important is the game and fun we had anyway and I had lots of other prizes to take home aside from the HOPIAs, it was like I went to the grocery store for free!!!

We will have to wait another year for another game but for sure it will once more be a noisy, happy event!