Hey everyone, welcome back to the postpartum wellness show. Today is the last episode of this mini-series on the confinement practice, part five of five.
Today will be short and sweet because I just want to talk to you about the celebrations that you can do after you finish your 30-day confinement and how we can take some of these more traditional celebrations and make them more modern.
There are two main celebrations that Chinese people celebrate after mom has finished her confinement, and it is the full moon celebration and baby's hundredth day. Now both of these have been celebrated for a very long time, but in today's time and age, there is a lot more emphasis on the baby's hundredth day.
In East Asia, you have event planners who have the 100th day packages, similar to how big baby showers are in the United States. The 100th day is huge for many East Asian families; hotel ballrooms can get booked out. It's a full-on very glam party for some families, and it's good fun, really.
So, we'll start off with the full moon celebration, and I'm looking down because I'm going to read from my book so you guys get the good stuff. Now the full moon is traditionally considered the full 30 days after birth, and it is the first birthday of a newborn or the baby's full moon. Full moon because it follows the full lunar cycle from the new moon to the full moon or waning to waxing, and it takes about 30 days.
Now, I remember being told by my mom that my Chinese birthdays, I'm always a year older than my Western birthday age. The reason for that is it seems that it's considered that the baby has started their life in the womb, and once they're born, when they reach this first 30 days of life, it's considered that you have completed that first year of life from when you were conceived in your mom's belly. That's something interesting to consider in Chinese culture.
This full moon period also marks the end of the new mom's confinement month, and she's now able to bathe, wash her hair, and be presented together with the baby to the family. Of course, this is a massive avenue for celebration because when you think about a lot of these practices, they come from ancient times when many moms and babies didn't really make it due to the lack of advanced medicine or clinical practices that improve maternal and infant survival.
For a baby to make it the first 30 days and for a mom to recover from the rigorous activity of childbirth, it's an absolute cause for celebration. So that's one way of celebrating the end of your confinement.
The other thing is to do the baby's hundredth day celebration. What's interesting here is I also remember my mom telling me, 'Even if you finish your confinement after 30 days, maybe wait till three months after the baby is born before you take your baby out, go to parties, or have people come over to celebrate the baby.'
Her reasoning was that you want the baby's immune system to grow. You want the baby to get stronger before you introduce them to the whole world where there are germs out there and strangers coming to see the baby, or at least strangers to the baby.
Traditionally, these 100th day celebrations come from Imperial Ancient Chinese days, which is described in the Book of Rites in the section called the Pattern of the Family. So what they do during this time specifically is the shaving of the baby's hair. As I've mentioned in a previous episode, the process of childbirth, with all the fluids, is considered dirty and unlucky. Yes, for those of you listening, I'm rolling my eyes.
Those of you watching this, you can see me do little eye rolls as I say things like that. It's believed that when the baby is born, they're covered in all the fluid, and their hair is also polluted with all of these fluids. So at the hundredth day, when they've lived that long and they're thriving, then it's a tradition to shave off that hair, to shave off the pollution and the unluckiness so that they can continue to thrive after that. That's where the hair-shaving tradition came from.
In today's time, some families still do the hair shaving, either at the baby's full moon or the 100th day. The reasoning now is instead of all these unluckiness or unlucky fluids in the hair, it's the belief that shaving the hair will cause the hair to grow back stronger and thicker.
So if you want your baby to have thicker hair, then go ahead and do that. Whether that's true or not, I haven't come across any evidence to show that. Personally, I did not shave my girl's head at all. So any hair that they've got right now has been there since they were born.
But for those of you who have, let me know in the comments or write me. How was this hair shaving practice for you? Did you think that it made your baby's hair grow back thicker or were you able to compare that with other members of your family or friends? Was one baby's hair thinner than the other? I would love to know and hear from you.
So the full moon celebration, hundred day celebration, what is done during this time is pretty similar. At the end of the 100th day, there is the bathing for mom and baby as well before they're presented for the celebration.
Very similar to the full moon. The other thing is the adornment and wearing of a lot of red clothes, a lot of gold jewelry. Red in Chinese culture means auspicious, it means luck, it means a lot of good things. Wearing gold jewelry as well, well, it's gold, it's wealth, it's prosperity. It's all about being lucky, being bright, and having abundance. These are the significances of wearing the color and gifting gold jewelry.
For my girls, I had a lot of family members and my mom as well. They gifted little baby anklets of gold. Depending on how wealthy your friends and family are, you can gift them as much precious gold as you would like. Thinking back to the ancient times, it was reasonable to do a practice like this because should anything happen, then the family will have this gold on hand to exchange for money for sustenance if there was ever any need or emergency that arose.
How often are you going to have your baby wear that gold anklet or the gold necklace? They're going to grow so quickly; they're going to outgrow those jewelry. It's not just for fancy wearing; it's really for the significance of gifting something that traditionally has a lot of meaning for goodness and good luck. It also helps if you need to pawn it, to put it bluntly.
The other thing is red-dyed hard-boiled eggs. You would boil the eggs and then use red dye to color the outer shell. There's no real flavoring to it, but again, the significance of red dye means good luck. The hard-boiled egg signifies new birth and the renewal of life, including new beginnings. This red-dyed hard-boiled eggs are made and distributed around to everyone at the party.
But what can you do as a modern family? Most of us now are living in the West, or even if you're back home in the East, many parts of our countries are getting more modern, and we have a lot more things that we can do for either the baby's full moon or 100th day. You can still celebrate both if that is what you wish.
For me, we did both celebrations, although we did that when we were in the States with very small groups of people. The idea was to have the 30-day full moon celebration only for the closest family because we didn't want a big party when the baby was only 30 days old.
For the full moon celebration, we did a very small dinner just with my in-laws and my side of the family with the newborn baby. For the 100th day, we did something a bit bigger. We invited friends, family again, but it was a bigger party, and the baby was more robust at the time. I was a bit more comfortable as a first-time mom to allow other people to carry my baby as well.
So that was a good time to have a bigger party for the 100th day. You could have both, or you could just focus on one. It's really up to you. If you go for the 100th day and you're in that part of the world where you've got the party planners and the culture is there for a big celebration and that's what you want to do, then I say go for it because it's good fun.
One way of modernizing the full moon and the 100th day celebration is really to include mom. As the name of these celebrations already says, it's baby's full moon, baby's 100th day. So include mom, make this a day about her thriving in her motherhood journey. Especially if you're a first-time mom, you've made it 30 days in.
Even more so at the 100th day, you've made it three months and more. Shine the spotlight on her as well, send her to have a big spa retreat with manicures, pedicures, help her have her makeup done if that's what she would like. Get her hair done, get her a new outfit so that when she comes up to the party, it's also about her as much as it's about the baby. Give her a gift, as much as you're going to gift the baby. Maybe gold anklets, a red packet, a hongbao. Give mom something too, maybe a gift card to go somewhere so she can treat herself.
A lot of things in my book, it's not really changing traditions so much. It's adjusting, adding mom back into the picture. Bringing her back to the center of attention, shining the spotlight back on her. I think that's a very important thing for us to do because we are starting to see the burnout among moms, the feeling of invisibility once a woman enters motherhood.
Our moms, aunts, and the women before us have all experienced that. I feel really strongly that by doing things this way, by bringing the woman and the mother back into the picture, it's going to help our next generation of women and mothers to feel really appreciated and to look forward to this.
I can say for myself, I definitely did not look forward to motherhood at all or becoming a woman because all the narrative that I had grown up around was you sacrifice so much and you put yourself last. You should never be the center of attention anymore after you become a mom.
Honestly, I can say that was a big part of why my postpartum depression was also pretty bad because of things that I had grown up around, never really thought about, but had come out quite strongly as soon as I stepped into the mom shoes. But that's a story for another day.
Now it's all about celebrations. One thing you could do as well is, for those of you in the West and you have had a baby shower, you could do something similar during the full moon or the 100th day. You could incorporate games as well. There are no traditional games that I know of, well, besides the one on the 100th day.
If your baby can crawl or reach for things, there is that game about which item or which fruit or vegetable will your baby reach for, and that will forecast their future career, which I think is just hilarious because they can't really see that well at that age anyway. Whatever they pick is just going to be the most shiny thing that they can get their hands on. Yeah, do with that information what you will, but most importantly is just to have fun.
Now for food that you can have during this time. If you're going to have a party planner and you're going to host it at a hotel or an event space, then eat whatever you like. If you're having it at home and you want to have it in a more intimate setting, what you could do is do a hot pot because we're talking about Chinese cultures here, traditions, and practices. We love a good steamboat in Malaysia; we call it steamboat. Hot pot, I guess, for other Asian diasporas.
You can do that at home because you're just cooking food around this steaming hot soup. Get those pots that have a divider in the center so you can have spicy soup on one side and a clearer broth on the other side. Everyone with different spice tolerance can have whatever they like.
Another thing many Malaysians do is have ang ku kueh. For those of you listening, if you pop on the blog, I'm going to put pictures there. Those of you on YouTube, I'm going to show you a picture here. Kueh is essentially a steamed cake, a steamed dessert. They're from the Malaysian Nyonya culture, and our peers in Indonesia also have similar cakes. We call them kueh.
The ang ku kueh is called as is because it's tortoise-shaped. Having this during the 100th day and the full moon celebration is because the tortoise signifies a long life because they live for so long. Another food that you could incorporate.
Another thing that I've asked my mom about is having the Yee Sang. This is, I suppose, a translation or a description that I can best describe, which is what I called it in my book, is a prosperity salad toss. This dish comes from Chinese New Year or Lunar New Year, created in Malaysia. What happens is this massive salad with fish, with all the ingredients, signifies some form of prosperity, wealth, and good luck.
Just like the hot pot and the steamboat, you mix the salad together with a big group of people, and you shout well wishes for whatever you're tossing to at the time. I asked my mom if this would be a good thing to do during the 100th day or the full moon because you're getting people together, and she said, why not? It's such a fun thing and it's got such a good meaning behind the dish.
That's why I suggested that as a dish to do for these two celebrations. Go get my book if you want more about my special recipe for the sauce and other ideas on what you can do for these celebrations in chapter 10.
That's that for the mini-series on confinement. If you guys have any questions, please drop a note in the comments, the YouTube video comments, or write me. I'm going to put a link in the show notes so you guys can just contact me easy. I hope you enjoyed the series so far. Let me know what you think.
I would absolutely love some feedback so I can make things better or expand the series into something based on what you guys want to hear. If you want to go back, there are five parts to this. I'm gonna link it all in the description so you can easily find things and I will see you in the next episode.