Celebration of the Lantern Festival

It is an auspicious year for Grand Toastmasters Club. We have the first regular meeting after the Lunar New Year holidays on Lantern Festival. I thought again and again what I could do to create a celebratory atmosphere to bring joy to members on the special evening. Maybe a lantern parade during the intermission would be ideal.

No sooner than later when I was informed by EVP of my assignment as the timer this evening, I was excited to convert three of my lanterns into the timing devices to fulfill my timer's responsibility in a festive way. I painted a white lantern in yellow and wrote District 67 on it to serve as the yellow timing board.

The lanterns didn't achieve the expected effect in a brightly-lit lecture hall. And I shouldn't have chosen a red lantern in the shape of a strawberry to substitute the green timing board. It was confusing to speakers, especially those late comers who missed the briefing of unique timing rules. Nevertheless, most members were quite pleased to celebrate the first meeting of the Year of the Rat in a meaningful and memorable way.

After the club meeting, I joined a few old friends to participate in the lantern parade at Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall. It was the first time Taipei Lantern Festival was moved to the Sun-Yat-sen Memorial Hall since the first Taipei Lantern Festival was launched in 1990 at the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall.

The serene and peaceful Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall became a huge open-air night market jammed with city dwellers as well as residents from other cities by chartered buses. A huge fire ball lantern signifying the wedding party of the rat family was placed in front of the hall. When the multicolored lantern was lit up every 30 minutes at night, it left the viewers in awe. The columns around the corridors of the hall were wrapped with big red ribbons to celebrate the wedding day of joy and happiness.

My handmade lanterns drew a lot of attention from parade goers. When a young woman asked me where I bought my lovely lanterns, "I made them", I replied proudly. How nice it is to be acknowledged with my cute lanterns, my pride in my hand.

On Lantern Festival, I felt blissful to be able to bring up the value of the unity and wholeness of lanterns in Toastmasters and beyond. I look forward to the next lantern festival and many lantern festivals to come in the future. The Year of the Rat is indeed auspicious at the very beginning of a new 12 year Chinese zodiac cycle.