The cultural holiday is celebrated as widely in Asian countries such as China, Taiwan and Vietnam as it is in the East Bay. This year, Cupertino held its annual festival two weekends ago and San Francisco held its street fair last weekend.

In Oakland, Chinatown residents will celebrate this weekend in a low-key fashion, with their families at home, said Jennie Ong of the Chinatown Chamber of Commerce.

A few miles away in the Eastlake district, a community groupis organizing an all-day free festival at Clinton Park on Sunday, complete with food, singers and a lantern-making contest for kids.

"For us, the Vietnamese community, it's a way of celebrating our tradition," said festival organizer Hongha Le of the Vietnamese American Cultural & Educational Association.

Tet Trung Thu, she said, is the second-largest cultural holiday celebrated by Vietnamese, next to Lunar New Year.

Traditionally, it was also a celebration for children. They would make lanterns from clear, colored paper in all sorts of shapes, from simple diamonds to complex fish and dragons, said Le.

Then, when nighttime arrives, children gather in groups, each holding a lantern with a candle inside and sing a traditional Mid-Autumn song.

Parents would give children candy or mini-mooncakes to

Huong Viet, a nonprofit that runs a Vietnamese-language school in Oakland, also will hold a lantern-making workshop at the Oakland Museum of California on Saturday evening.

Executive Director Ky Vo said kids like the colorful papers used to make the lanterns, which he purchased while on a recent trip to Vietnam. The lanterns are carried around and also hung outside and inside houses, he said.

Although there is no organized public festival in Chinatown to celebrate the Moon Festival, many bakeries and small markets began carrying the famously rich and gooey mooncake about a month ago.

The palm-sized cakes are filled with lotus seed, mung bean or red bean, and usually contain one to four egg yolks in the middle.

"That represents the moon inside the Earth," said Le. "A long time ago, we thought that the earth was square."

The small but dense cakes start at $3 a piece and go up, and are often given as gifts.

The Moon Festival this year happens to fall between two nationalistic holidays that Chinese-Americans celebrate.

On Oct. 1, many in the community celebrated China's National Day, one of the major holidays celebrated in China. It's the day, in 1949, that Mao Zedong declared the People's Republic of China.

In Chinatown, people celebrated with a dinner at Peony restaurant last weekend and a banner flanked by Chinese national flags was raised across Webster Street.

Tuesday is Taiwan National Day, which is also celebrated in Oakland's Chinatown.

Milton Fong, director of the Chinese Consolidated Association in Oakland, comprised of 14 associations, said there will be a Taiwanese flag-raising ceremony in front of City Hall on Monday morning.

The holiday is dubbed "Double 10" for the date, and celebrates Taiwan.

He added that there will be a banquet-style dinner celebration — at Peony, the same restaurant where residents celebrated China's National Day.

Lantern-making takes place from 4 to 6 p.m. Saturday at the Oakland Museum of California. The event is free to the public, and there will be free parking in the museum lot. Lantern-making is followed by performances between 6 and 8 p.m.

Tet Trung Thu, or the Mid-Autumn Festival, takes place from 10 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Sunday at Clinton Park, 1230 6th Ave. in Oakland. For more information, visit http://www.vaced.org.