Feliz Chuseok?

Happy Chuseok, Merry Chuseok, Feliz Chuseok? It doesn't matter how you say it, or why you say it. All that matters is that you understand what the holiday is. What's that you say (no, not the Sprung Monkey song) you don't know what Chuseok is? Well, in that case let me educate you. Or, at least in my own way attempt to explain just what this Chuseok thingy is.

Chuseok (pronounced Chew Sock) is the second most important holiday on the Korean calendar. A simple explanation is that Chuseok is a Korean Thanksgiving without all the genocidal implications. Yet, that simplifies the matter far to much. Chuseok is a harvest festival that falls on the 15th day of the 8th month of the Lunar calendar. How that translates to the Julian calendar is it happens somewhere around the Autumnal Equinox. I know I'm not giving you guys any help in determining when this is, so here is the best I can do. It happens sometime in September or early October.

Koreans celebrate this holiday many different ways. The first is that almost every Korean heads back home for the holiday. The first thing this leads to is massive traffic jams across the country. If you are lucky enough to live on the main rail artery through the country, then you can fight with the rest of the people who refuse to drive and attempt public transit. Needless to say travel is a nightmare given that most people have two or three days off of work. Once they have arrived home Koreans tend to meet their friends for dinner and drinks. The day before they spend most of their time preparing food and making sure that everything they require is on hand. Think day before Thanksgiving or Christmas at the supermarket or mall and you'll have a good idea what shopping is like.

The day of, the family wakes early and prepares a ceremonial table of food in front of the family "shrine". I have shrine in quotation marks because it's not really a shrine, but a room divider with Chinese and Korean symbols on it. That honestly isn't a good explanation either so I will just include a picture of it and hope you guys get what I mean. That morning the whole family will gather to pay respect to their ancestors through several means. The first thing they do is they prepare a Jesasang. This is a ceremonial table full of food that acts as a type of offering to the ancestors. However, this is not an offering in the sense of Dia De Los Muertos where the food is left. The offering is for the ancestors to come and have a meal with the family. The family channels their ancestors by burning incense and a piece of paper with the names of their ancestors upon it. After doing this they preform several Buddhist style bows (head to the floor bow).

With the ceremony complete the family then sits down to a feast of a meal. Traditionally the meal includes Bulgogi (marinated meat), Mulgogi (fish), Kalbi Jim (marinated ribs), Songpyeon (rice cake), Chapchae (Korean style Chow Mein but they don't fry the noodles), and fruit.

Now I must state that this feast tends to take place in the morning. I had some friends who were doing this at 6 AM. Other were doing this at 10 AM. The family that I celebrated with did so at 7:30 AM. After enjoying the meal, the family then heads to the family graves to pay their respects, leave flowers, and trim the plants around the graves. Now it's important to note that only the men are required to do this. Some of the women are expected to stay behind and clean up. Which is really unfair considering they had to cook in the first place.

After visiting the graves the family then will go to their grandmothers house. What they do here varies by family. My friends family went there and farmed for eight hours. After this, they official duties of the day are done and the people are free to do what they want that night. This normally leads to the entire town heading out to the bars to drink with friends they have not seen in some time. Well, at least here in Seosan that is what this leads to.

I was lucky enough to spend this Holiday with my good friend Seung Hee (Alia). Her mother invited me to come eat with their family. I have to say I was quite surprised when they told me the meal would be held at 7:30 AM. When Alia told me this the first time I said "You mean PM?" She then corrected me and it was then that I found out they tend to do this really early in the morning. The other unique facet about this holiday and other traditional holidays like it is that the actual ceremony takes little to no time at all. The ceremony was done in ten minutes and the feast was done in 45 minutes. The explanation I was given for this is two fold. First Korea has been a very poor country until only recently. Many families could not afford extravagant feasts that went on for hours. In fact most families couldn't. The second reason the ceremony is so short was because since 1953 the country has lived under the threat of invasion. My friends say that you never know when the bombs may drop so they do these things quickly.

I am very grateful to Alia's family for allowing me and Joe (another foreigner) to partake in their families celebration. This is not the first time that I have been invited to her house for a family feast. I guess this means that she gets to come over for Thanksgiving. Wait, who am I joking. I will probably be cooking Thanksgiving dinner at her parents apartment.