First Moon Celebration

Last week, my husband’s publisher, Adrian celebrated his daughter’s first month’s birthday. In Chinese, it’s called the Full Moon celebration. He gave us a box of goodies,  which is a butter cake, 2 mini fruit and cheese tarts (it’s at the back on the left side), 2 hard boiled eggs (the shell has been dyed red), 2 ang ku (which is a soft pastry filled with sweet crushed peanuts inside) and a small plastic toy. Isn’t it cute?

We celebrated both our kids Full Moon as well, though in such different ways. We passed around Full Moon packages to friends and family for our first kid when he celebrated his first 30 days on earth. The second kid had a grander celebration. We had a big party at the nearby KFC restaurant, complete with Super Chook chicken mascot, cake, playground for the kids to play in, and lots of food for everyone. Hubby wrote a very interesting article about our first Full Moon experience.

Here’s an excerpt from his blog

And here’s the irony:

I paid for those packages at the full price quoted by them.

And I’ve incurred some costs and expenses in traveling to find 100 families to give the packages to.

This means that I was PAYING the restaurant what they were asking for, to distribute SAMPLES of their food for them at MY OWN cost, to 100 of MY own contacts!

And EACH and EVERY ONE of my contacts were potential customers of that restaurant!

Anyways, if you want to read further, just click on the picture and the article will appear.

Full Moon package designs have very much improved since Yang-Yang was born. Early this year, my mum received a similar package from a total stranger, who lives nearby. You can now even put the baby’s picture on the box. And the selection of stuff you want to put in the box are much, much wider as well. Just click on Baby Amber’s Full Moon picture to read about how we got this package, and what is a Full Moon celebration.

This afternoon, my mum got a pleasant surprise package; a Full Moon present from a family we have never met.

For those who don’t know what a Full Moon is; the end of the full moon period marks the first month of a Chinese baby’s birth. It is also the period when the mother completes her confinement period which to me is also known as the month of pampering, eating lots of meat and wine … if the old folks have their way, and smelling like a caveman in the hottest month of July because, again, the old folks believe bathing will make a woman’s body weak in the later years. Frankly, I think getting the good woman smelling like a bed of garbage just turns the husband green in the face. A man won’t, in his right mind, want to do the horizontal mumbo with a being that smells faintly of rotting fish, right?

But, back to the baby.

It was a surprise for my family to receive this gift because we don’t know who they are. My mum had asked the Indian guy who handed her the box of goodies if he got the right address, and he said “yup”.  Turns out, he is the driver for the family who lives in the big house on the hill near where my mum lives. He said, the father of the baby asked him to hand out these gift boxes to random houses around the neighborhood. It’s really intriging, the reason why they did that because the usual method is to pass the gift boxes to limited friends and familes.

Different shops sells different Full Moon packages. If you want to see what my husband and I ordered for our first born’s full moon celebration, just go to this webpage. http://senze.com/business-blog/viral-marketing/viral-marketing.htm. We didn’t send out full moon presents on behalf of our second son because we decided to hold a party at a nearby KFC restaurant instead.