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For three days in autumn, Seoul empties.
Ten million people leave for their hometowns at the same time, a drive that normally takes three hours takes eight, and the city becomes quiet in a way it never is otherwise. That's Chuseok, and it's the closest thing Korea has to an American Thanksgiving, except it's older, it's tied to the harvest moon, and the food takes two days to make.
What It Actually Is
Chuseok falls on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, which shifts each year on the Western calendar. It's a harvest festival: a thank-you for the year's crops, and a time to visit ancestral graves and share a meal with the family you don't see often enough.
The full moon matters. The traditional phrase is that you should live as well as you do on Chuseok, meaning abundantly.
The Food
Songpyeon. Half-moon rice cakes filled with sesame, honey, chestnut or red bean, steamed over pine needles so they carry a faint forest smell. Families make them together the night before, and there's a saying that whoever shapes beautiful songpyeon will have a beautiful child or a good spouse, which is mostly an excuse to get everyone folding.
Jeon. Savory pancakes, endless kinds: zucchini, fish, mushroom, minced beef patties. Someone stands at the stove for hours. Every Korean family has an argument about who does this work, and that argument is itself part of Chuseok.
Galbijjim. Braised short ribs, the centerpiece.
New rice and fresh fruit. Asian pears, persimmons and jujubes, presented in boxes so elaborate they look like jewelry cases.
The Gifts
Korean holiday gifting is an industry. Department stores build entire floors around it in September. The standard gifts are Spam gift sets, which are genuinely prestigious here, cooking oil sets, dried seaweed, fruit boxes, and red ginseng, which is what you give someone whose health you want to look after.
The logic is practical rather than sentimental. You give things a household will use, in a quantity that's slightly excessive, because the excess is the message.
A tea collection like this one is a common Korean holiday gift. Source: Daebak. Shop it here.
What Modern Chuseok Looks Like
It's changing, fast. Younger Koreans increasingly skip the ancestral rites, travel abroad instead, or gather for a short lunch rather than three days. Hotel packages and Chuseok holidays overseas are now normal. Plenty of families order the jeon instead of frying it.
What hasn't changed is the traffic, the moon, and the sense that this is the week when Korea slows down.
If You Want to Mark It From Abroad
You don't need to cook for two days. A few small things carry the feeling: make or buy songpyeon, drink something warm, send a gift to someone whose health you care about, and look at the full moon. That last one is the actual tradition.
Our Daebak Box often lands with seasonal Korean items around the major holidays, which is our version of sending a gift to the people we care about.
The Daebak Box, our way of sending Korea to people abroad. Source: Daebak. Shop it here.
The Other Big One
Seollal, Lunar New Year, is the winter counterpart. Tteokguk, rice cake soup, is eaten that morning, and eating it is what makes you a year older in the traditional count. Same traffic, different soup.
Written in Seoul during Chuseok week, when our office is closed and the streets are strangely quiet.
