Dōngzhì Festival

This year Dōngzhì Festival or Winter Solstice Festival falls on 21/12/20. It is one of the most important Chinese and East Asian festivals celebrated by the Chinese, Taiwanese, Malaysian, Singaporeans, Japanese, Koreans, and Vietnamese during the Dōngzhì solar term (winter solstice), some day between December 21 to December 23.

The origins of this festival can be traced back to the yin and yang philosophy of balance and harmony in the cosmos. After this celebration, there will be days with longer daylight hours and therefore an increase in positive energy flowing in. The philosophical significance of this is symbolized by the I Ching hexagram fù (Chinese: 復, "Returning").In Northern China, people celebrate the festival with dumplings while in Southern China, it was celebrated with rice balls. The rice balls are called tāng yuán.

Below are some links on the history of the festival.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dongzhi_Festival  
https://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/leisure/2020/12/21/whats-the-story-behind-dongzhi/
https://www.easytourchina.com/fact-v361-the-winter-solstice-festival

Two of our students had tried rice balls before but didn’t realise that it was related to a festival. They were very intrigued to find the history and how to make the rice balls. We did a workshop with them. 

This is being shown on the video & photos of our students & family making the rice balls and trying out the delicious and creative panda rice balls. It was so yummy and delicious. 

Videos to both our students making tāng yuán and the recipe and ingreidents are shown below.