Americans have many strange customs. One of them involves wedding cake. The bridal couple is supposed to save the smallest layer of their wedding cake, wrap it up in plastic and keep it on a shelf for the first year of marriage. Then they are supposed to eat it on their anniversary. I have no idea when or where this custom originated, but wedding cakes are now built to last.

Our wedding cake was made to to take us well past our paper, maybe even to our tin anniversary. It was fruitcake, preserved in rum, then hermetically sealed in sugar icing. My parents put it in the cupboard on our wedding day. It sat there for almost a year, waiting for August 20th to roll around again.

In the meantime, Josh and I decided to move to China. I didn’t give much thought to the wedding cake, but my mother decided it would be bad luck not to eat it. She wrapped it up in a few back issues of The New Yorker, and sent the little cake through the mail.

The cake arrived too late for our anniversary, but just in time for the Mid-Autumn Festival. The Festival is thousands of years old, and roughly equivalent to American Thanksgiving. It is a harvest festival. People travel to their hometowns where they eat mooncakes and look at the moon.

Mooncakes are covered with a pretty thin layer of pastry, and the rest of the cake is entirely made up of the filling. Traditional fillings are black sesame paste, red bean or jujube. They are as heavy as bricks, but still good. Black sesame is my favorite.

I have asked several Chinese friends about the significance of the Mid-Autumn Festival, and of the mooncakes, and they all tell me that the full moon represents the fullness of family. Likewise, the round mooncakes.

Our wedding cake is also round. It also represents family, and it’s as heavy as a brick. It is a perfect, multi-culti treat for the Mid-Autumn Festival.