Mid-Autumn Festival, also known as Children’s Festival or Moon-gazing Festival, takes place on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month when the moon is roundest and brightest. At this time of the year, as the weather has turned cooler and the crops are waiting for harvest, Vietnamese people sing folk songs and play traditional games, praying for bumper crops. On the full moon night, children indulge themselves in lantern procession and lion dances while adults gaze at the moon, eat mooncakes, drink tea or lotus wine, and in some places, sing trống quân, a kind of popular repartee or alternate songs.
As early as under the Lý Dynasty, Mid-Autumn Festival became an important national festival. The king would hold various celebrations including ancestral worship, boat races, or water and land puppetries. Over to the Trần, nobilities would drink wine, chant verses, or stroll for sightseeing. Under the Lê - Trịnh Period, the mansions of Trịnh Lord were splendidly decorated with meticulously made lanterns.
From the first days of the eighth lunar month, parents already start to prepare lanterns for their kids. On the full moon night, children would gather together, each holding in their hands a brightly-lit lantern in the shape of a star, spin, carousel or rabbit. Then they would roam the whole village, singing and dancing a long their way under the light of the autumn moon.
The đèn kéo quân or carousel lantern is an exciting type of lamp that has a swiveling case to facilitate the rotation of horses in the first place. The horses then were replaced withother figures such as doctoral candidates returning home from a successful court exam, foursacred animals dancing, or even Tang Seng and his disciples in Journey to the West. Currently, such villages as Đàn Viên in Hanoi or Mật Sơn in Thanh Hoá are the existing guardians of this toy-making tradition.