Happy Chuseok!

This past weekend was Chuseok, or the Full Moon Harvest Celebration-- one of the two biggest holidays in Korea. Emerging as a custom of ancient agrarian society, it is the day that Koreans have traditionally set aside to give thanks to their ancestors for the year's harvest and to share their abundance with neighbors, family and friends.

I celebrated Chuseok with family in the neighboring city of Suwon. Customarily, on Chuseok morning families hold memorial services for their ancestors and visit ancestral graves, but the family members that I stayed with are not so traditional. Celebrating Chuseok with them was much more like celbrating Thanksgiving at home. We spent the majority of the day simply enjoying one anothers company, eating a lot, playing Go-Stop, watching TV and playing the Wii-- in fact, just substitue Rook for Go-Stop and add in a family football game, and it would sound exactly the same as a Reese-Green-Hooke family Thanksgiving.

The representative foods of Chuseok are freshly harvested rice, fresh fruits, and songpyeon, a tasty kind of rice cake. Click on the photo to read more about the varieties of songpyeon-- from acorn, to pumpkin, to clam-- and to see the recipe for making it at home.


I also visited Hwaseong Palace and Hangook Minseokcheon Korean Folk Village while staying with my family for Chuseok. Both are sort-of open air museums displaying how Koreans lived in the past and are common tourist attractions, so I first assumed my family was only visiting them for my benefit. However, there were actually a ton of people-- and only a few appeared to be foreigners-- who were touring these places with their families on Chuseok. I guess it makes sense; after all, Chuseok is a day to give thanks, but also to remember your ancestors and celebrate your history.

Many of the families who were out had younger children with them and were dressed in colorful hanboks, or traditional Korean clothing, which was fun to see. Hanboks are so beautiful-- and I have decided that that is the one and only souvenier that I want to bring back home with me from Korea. I'll just have to make sure to get my hambok before Seollal (New Years), though, because that is Korea's next big holiday and will be one of my only legitimate chances to wear it here. I'm definitely already looking forward to experiencing it :)