My Daily Roti Kopitiam - Are Traditional Holidays Still Significant to Modern Children?

Today is the Mid-Autumn Festival, otherwise known as mooncake festival for chinese people all over the world and I am stuck in my room doing my lab report. The mooncake festival really brings back a whole lot of memories for me. Not only the mooncakes I used to eat (actually I don't really like mooncakes), but especially the lanterns. I remembered the days when I used to go over to my granpa's to have sort of a gathering with all my cousins and we used to light up (sometimes literally) and take the lanterns and stroll around the taman at night. I also remembered that besides us there were also kids from other families strolling around the taman and we used to join them and play together. Also, not to mention we used to look forward to Chinese New Year where we would run around the taman chasing after lion dances, playing with fireworks (those days they were legal) and fire.

"Yeeer...mama, why this cake so weird de? Got egg inside de? No nice leh", says the kid wearing thick spectacles sitting in front of his computer creating a new strain of computer virus.

    However, all these activities just started to fade away with the advancement in technology. Today, it is a rare sight to see children still playing with lanterns and chasing after lion dances. Because they rather stay at home shooting up people on their computers. Very few children realise the significance of traditional holidays. They are actually important because if they weren't, you wouldn't be having a day off from school. A lot of modern parents don't help as well, they don't seem to feel it is important to educate their children on the importance of festivals. Sooner or later, these holidays will just become another day off school or work.

    I actually rather prefer to live back in the days when there were no computers in every house and children propose their liking for each other with scented love letters rather than email that would end up in the junk mail. Those days were more interesting. When my parents proposed to go to a restaurant to have our reunion dinner on the eve of CNY, I actually objected because it would be meaningless. Yet, many families do that nowadays. Some even decide to skip CNY and go for a vacation. These days, holidays have become rather boring. Probably the only interesting thing about CNY nowadays is I get to rest longer, eat better and get new clothes. Children have become soft nowadays with over protective parents. They don't get to play with fireworks a lot while in my childhood, me and my cousins would try to think of interesting ways to demolish stuff, blacken the walls of other people's houses with fireworks, strap insects to fireworks. Nowadays children are happy with even the "sand fireworks", heck, we used to pop those with our fingers while children nowadays think its dangerous to throw it at each other.

    It is a pity to see this happening. I guess when new things come in, some older stuff have to give way and be sacrificed in place. The world is getting worse and less interesting. Back in the old days, many of us didn't even knew where babies came from until we were in high school while you can probably catch your 9 year old brother looking at dirty stuff on your com, or you wouldn't because he knows how to delete the history.

    It is true that traditional holidays are getting less significant for the younger generation, but however bad the situation is, there will still be those that treasure them. The festivals might be less interesting but they will never die off.