Mid-Autumn Festival coloring pages: lanterns and mooncakes

The Mid-Autumn Festival is the night of the full moon on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month, and the coloring pages kids enjoy most show what families actually do that night: lanterns, mooncakes, tea, a big round moon and everyone outside looking up at it. In 2027 it falls on Wednesday, September 15: Hong Kong's official 2027 holiday list gives September 16 as the day following the festival, and the Hong Kong Observatory's 2027 calendar table shows September 15 as the 15th day of the eighth lunar month. Below are page ideas, simple crafts, notes on the Vietnamese and Korean celebrations of the same moon, and picture books to read first.

A note on approach: Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean families each keep this full moon in their own way. Everything below links to a community group, museum or author, and where your family does it differently, your family is right.

What the festival is, in a sentence a four-year-old gets

The San Francisco Chinatown Merchants Association, which has held an Autumn Moon Festival in Chinatown since 1991, explains that the moon's role in bountiful harvests is widely recognized during autumns, and that ancient households set up altars with incense, candles, fruit, flowers and mooncakes when the full moon appeared. For a preschooler: "It's the night the moon is the roundest and brightest of the whole year. Families eat round cakes and look at the moon together."

Coloring page ideas that match real traditions

Page	What to draw	Where it comes from
The full moon	A huge circle over rooftops, with a family on a balcony or in a yard	The festival night is the full moon of the eighth lunar month
Mooncakes	A round cake cut into four wedges, with a round yolk in the middle	Cantonese-style mooncakes are often cut into quarters so the yolk looks like a full moon
Chang'e, the moon lady	A woman in long flowing sleeves floating toward the moon	The legend of the Moon Goddess
The rabbit on the moon	A rabbit sitting on the moon's surface	One of the moon stories families tell
Lanterns	Round, star and rabbit-shaped lanterns on strings	Lanterns are central to the Vietnamese children's festival
Tea and fruit	A teapot, small cups and a bowl of fruit	Families share tea and treats while they watch the moon

The mooncake details come from the Chinatown Merchants Association's history page, which says the familiar round cakes have soft golden brown crusts filled with sweet lotus paste and a salted duck egg, customarily cut into quarters so the yolk resembles a full moon. The same page tells the legend of the Moon Goddess, Chang E, and notes that mooncakes vary from region to region and from country to country, including in Indonesia, Japan, Singapore and Vietnam. So a "mooncake" page can look different in every family. Ask your child which kind is on your table.

For the story pages, Loretta Seto's picture book has a girl's parents tell three legends about the moon while they eat mooncakes and drink tea, including the Jade Rabbit. Reading it first gives kids characters to draw.

Tết Trung Thu: the Vietnamese children's festival

Vietnamese families celebrate the same full moon as Tết Trung Thu. A history site from George Mason University's Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media describes it as a children's festival associated with the full moon, a time especially devoted to children after the harvest. The same page explains that children bang drums and wear lion or tiger masks, and that handcrafted lanterns are an important part of it, with traditional shapes including a five-star lantern to represent the sun and a frog shape to represent the moon. It also mentions a lantern shaped like a rabbit from around 1900.

That gives you three easy pages: a five-pointed star lantern on a stick, a lion dance mask (a big round face with eyes and a fringe to color), and a carp, from the folk tale the page mentions about a carp who worked hard to become a dragon.

Libraries often host Trung Thu events. The Des Moines Public Library, for example, partnered with VietAdvocacy on a storytime with Vietnamese folktales, songs, lantern making and lion dances. Check your own library's calendar in September.

Chuseok: the Korean harvest festival

Korean families celebrate Chuseok on the same lunar date. The Asian Art Museum in San Francisco describes it as the annual Korean three-day festival celebrating the end of summer and the autumn harvest, held on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month, when families visit and tidy ancestors' graves and cook together to prepare food and offerings for them. The museum's free activity list includes making harvest prints and a no-sew bojagi, a Korean wrapping cloth, both of which work alongside coloring.

Good Chuseok pages: a family around a table of harvest food, a grandmother in a hanbok, wrapped gifts, and the full moon. Kathleen Choi's picture book has Su-Jin's halmoni, her grandmother, watching the moon grow larger each night as she gets ready for the holiday, with traditional foods and gifts wrapped in a special way.

Simple crafts that need nothing you have to buy

• A paper lantern. Color a lantern page, cut it out, roll it into a tube and tape it, then add a strip of paper for a handle. Toddlers can do the coloring; you do the cutting.
• A star lantern. For kids 5 and up, glue five paper strips into a star, color a sheet of tissue or thin paper and tape it over the frame.
• A mooncake you can color. Draw a big circle with a flower or pattern pressed into the top, then a second circle cut into four wedges with a yolk in the middle.
• A moon diary. For the two weeks before the festival, have your child draw the moon each night. Grace Lin's A Big Mooncake for Little Star turns the phases into a story about a girl who keeps nibbling at a mooncake every night, which makes it the perfect lead-in.

Trace final lines with a black marker before you photocopy them. Our guide to how to print coloring pages explains how to get crisp lines from a phone photo.

Picture books to read before you color

Book	Author	What it is about
Thanking the Moon	Grace Lin	Each member of a Chinese family contributes to the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival celebration, with an author's note on the customs. Short and gentle for toddlers.
A Big Mooncake for Little Star	Grace Lin	The phases of the moon as a girl nibbles the mooncake she baked with her mama.
Mooncakes	Loretta Seto	Three moon legends told over mooncakes and tea. Better for 4 and up.
Where Is the Moon?	Windy Pham	Mimi celebrates Moon Festival night with her mom in a bilingual Vietnamese and English story.
Giving Thanks With Halmoni	Kathleen Choi	Su-Jin, her halmoni and her friends get ready for Chuseok.

All five are in the Seattle Public Library catalog, so your own library likely has them or can borrow them.

A page with your own family under the moon

The page kids keep is the one with them in it: their family on the balcony, a grandparent cutting the mooncake, a cousin holding the star lantern. Stick figures count. If you want to trace a real family photo, our guide to turning a photo into a coloring page for free walks through it. Colorkin can also draw a page of your family from a photo, drafted with AI illustration tools and finished by a person.

For other holidays, see our Lunar New Year coloring pages and the rest of our family and heritage guides. If you are planning a class celebration, a class coloring book with a "how my family watches the moon" page for each child works well.

Questions parents ask