Category: holidays

Chinese New Year Banquet

We headed out in the cold last night to attend an 8-course Chinese New Year Banquet at a local seafood restaurant. Hosted by local foodie walking tour guide, Shirley Lum, the evening was both delicious and informative, as Lum explained Lunar New Year traditions and discussed various aspects of the Chinese zodiac as we ate.

Seated at a table of nine people, I must say, the evening, while festive, wasn’t especially banquet-like. Dishes didn’t come out in order, and for the $50 per person charge, we certainly didn’t leave as full as we normally might have if we had gone on our own. it was an opportunity to try many new dishes, however, and Greg even made a new friend.

Because we were at a large round table with a lazy susan in the centre, I wasn’t able to get shots of all the dishes as they arrived, but I did my best.

Each place setting had two kumquats and two candies. The candies represented the red and gold packets of money traditionally handed out at Chinese New Year, while the kumquats also represented wealth and life.

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Dead Yet?

Yesterday, Greg and I headed down to Harbourfront Centre to check out the annual Day of the Dead (Dia de Los Muertos) festival. I had heard from people who had gone in previous years that it wasn’t very good, but although the event was indeed small in scale compared to the summertime events that attract thousands and take over the entire Harbourfront complex, this was actually quite charming.

Along with a number of musical and dance performances, there were activities for kids such as a demo on how to make the traditional sugar skulls, cooking demos by local Mexican chefs, and a small marketplace, a restaurant area with a variety of Mexican foods, and a space where the traditional colourful shrines were set up in homage to famous Mexicans like Frida Kahlo and Cesar Chavez.

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Eating Well in the Afterlife

I loves me some Mexican food, so the first thing we did when we hit the Day of the Dead festival at Harbourfront Centre yesterday was to grab some grub. Our favourite folks from El Jacal were there serving up their awesome nachos, which meant we ended up ignoring the tasty-looking tacos from Mariachi’s, but we were just too full to eat any more.

Seating indoors was packed, so we ended up on an outdoor patio in the cold, but even that couldn’t quell our desire for nachos and tortillas and flautas and oh… the lovely wonderful churros. They weren’t hot from the fryer and I had to ward off hungry sparrows, but they were still amazingly fluffy and sweet, rolled in cinnamon sugar and doused in chocolate.

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Over the Moon

Despite the fact that it’s 32 freakin’ degrees celcius in Toronto today, it is actually Autumn. And in Chinatown, where they’re getting ready to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival, they’re buying mooncakes.

Wikipedia says:

Mooncake is a Chinese pastry traditionally eaten during the Mid-Autumn Festival. Typical mooncakes are round or rectangular pastries, measuring about 10 cm in diameter and 4-5 cm thick. A thick filling usually made from lotus paste is surrounded by a relatively thin (2-3 mm) crust and may contain yolks from salted duck eggs. Mooncakes are rich, heavy, and dense compared with most Western cakes and pastries. They are usually eaten in small wedges accompanied by Chinese tea.

I’ve been able to find non-egg mooncakes all year long throughout Chinatown, but the ones with eggs are more readily available during the Mid-Autumn Festival.

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The Holiday That Canada Gave the World

The Labour Day parade goes right by our apartment. It’s senseless to try and ignore it – it’s loud and raucous and it takes a full two and a half hours for all 25,000 marchers to go past. That’s the right number of 0s there. Crazy, huh?

Parade marchers get into the Canadian National Exhibition (the finish point of the parade) for free on Labour day. Many groups had extras of the wristbands that are given to marchers and were handing them out to people watching the parade at the end of the route where we were. We were offered wristbands a half dozen times – next year we’ll plan on taking some and joining the crowd.

What I didn’t know was that Labour Day actually started in Toronto, but apparently this was the first place where people marched, in 1872. There’s a long history of the city being a “union-town” and with so much history, it’s easy to understand why.

People marched with their kids and dogs and families. Almost all unions had snazzy matching shirts or even jackets. There were plenty of bands, especially steel drum bands. While I still find it hard to muster up sympathy for things like the recent job cuts that will affect unions like CAW (Canadian Auto Workers) because I really believe there should be fewer cars on the road, I grew up in a union household (both my parents belonged to unions, as did I at my first job working at a hospital), so for the most part, I believe and agree with the presence and power of the unions.

The parade is really a celebration of humanity and what people can achieve when they pull together. Our society owes a lot to the work of unions, and while they’re not always perfect, they do a lot to make our quality of life one of the best in the world.

Fruitcake Pr0n – Assume the Missionary Position

Every year there’s at least one of them. The fruitcake-hater. They’re a timid lot. Someone, at some point in time, has put “the fear” in them. In many cases, it was years ago; some manufactured atrocity handed out at the office, or Great-Aunt Bertha’s dry stale creation that’s been handed back and forth from branch to branch of the family for a dozen years or more.

I take my work as a fruitcake missionary very seriously. The thrill of the challenge of fightin’ words laid down with a combination of stubbornness and trepidation; it must have been what brought the religious zealots back to the south seas islands again and again for the chance to convince the heathen natives that clothes really were better than running around naked. Fruitcake really *is* better than no fruitcake, you just have to trust me.

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