Topic: Mid-Autumn and Moon Viewing
Does United States have Mid-Autumn and Moon Viewing?
Not observed here
There is no Mid-Autumn Festival in the United States. Not one of the eleven federal holidays takes the moon as its subject, and the closest thing to a harvest day is Thanksgiving — pinned by statute to the fourth Thursday of November, that is, pinned to a weekday rather than to a phase of the moon. That is exactly the watershed between two designs: one asks you to look up at tonight's moon, the other asks you to bundle the day into a weekend. The Mid-Autumn events in San Francisco and New York are run by communities and cities, and do not enter the holiday table.
What is this topic?
Around the same full moon, four different observances: Taiwan and mainland China take the day off, eat mooncakes, and gather as a family; the Korean-ethnic community of Yanbian in China keeps it as Chuseok, where tomb-sweeping comes first; and Japan does not close at all, treating it as an astronomical and seasonal night — where the national observatory is explicit that the 'harvest moon' is often not that night's full moon.
Sources and dates
Dates follow local time zones, calendars, and official notices. Check the source when a date is estimated or locally variable.