Who: Open Mingle
What: Mid-Autumn Festival
When: evening of October 6
Where: The enclosure (and maybe spillover)
Warnings: probably none, pure frivolity

Just like last year: No individual invitations, except by word of mouth, and word to those who might have been shanghaied into mooncake duty in come fashion, just a simple network announcement: It's Mid-Autumn Festival tonight. Setting up in the enclosure.

Last year the party was spread across the picturesque, cultivated beauty of Lotus Pier, a city on a broad lake full of lights and sparkle. This one's a bit different. The festival's in a small, plain village nestled into the crags of Dafan Mountain. The stalls aren't so decorative. The air is a little sharper, and big, bronze braziers glow at regular intervals, warming hands and leaving the crisp air a little smoky. Everything smells of leaves and the coming winter. The view is spectacular, if you find the right rock. The sky is enormous in the way it can only be in the mountains.

There are paper lanterns everywhere, fashioned into animals (rabbits dominate, but anyone who isn't a fan can find themselves something just as cute). Sweet osmanthus wine and sharp baiju and smoky tea that's always exactly hot enough are there for the taking. There's not nearly as much seafood as last year, but there's fried fishballs on sticks if you go looking. Lot of food on sticks in general, from fried grasshoppers to candied hawthorn berries. There are a lot of dumplings and pancakes, unabashedly northern.

Wen Ning thinks the enclosure's imaginary people are creepy, so the stalls are unmanned, and music comes from nowhere. This is less creepy. Ask a ghost.

All that is courtesy of the enclosure, but the table by the door is piled with real mooncakes. Some traditional, layered pastry and sweet lotus and salty egg, some simpler, pressed snowskin, and some experimental ice-cream filled concoctions. They are perhaps a little less polished. But they taste pretty good. A few copies of the legends surrounding the festival are written in Wen Ning's neat if uninspired calligraphy, as well as a nice plaque naming and thanking everyone who helped with the fussy prep.