Chuseok – Korean Thanksgiving Day

Chuseok (추석) is one of the biggest and most important holidays in Korea. Like the western version of Thanksgiving, Chuseok is a time of family and friends gathering to share, eat and spend quality time together giving thanks to loved ones – both current and past – for an abundant harvest.  The holiday, also referred to as Hangawi (한가위), is observed for three days when the full harvest moon appears (around the Autumn Equinox).

On the morning of Chuseok Day, food is prepared with the year’s fresh harvest and offered as a token of thanks to ancestors for the “ancestor memorial service”, known as Charye.  The major representative foods are freshly harvested rice, alcohol and songpyeon (Korean rice cakes).  

After the service, family members gather together to enjoy the delicious food.  Ancestral graves are visited and a ritual of “clearing the weeds” over the burial mound is conducted by families.  This custom is considered a duty, and expression of devotion and respect for one’s family. In the evening, families and friends will walk and gaze at the beauty of the full harvest moon, and play folk games such as Ganggangsullae (Korean circle dance). In this dance, women dressed in Hanbok (traditional Korean clothing) join hands and sing together, forming a circle of harmony.

Within East Asia, the timing coincides with that of the Chinese and Vietnamese Mid-Autumn Festival, as well as the Japanese Tsukimi festivals.

Fun Facts about the Korean Language: 

• Korean (한국어/조선말) is the official language of South Korea and North Korea, as well as one of the two official languages in China's Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture.
• Approximately 80 million people speak Korean worldwide. Korean is also spoken in large ethnic Korean communities in China, Japan, the USA and Central Asia.
• For over a millennium, Korean was written with adapted Chinese characters called hanja, complemented by phonetic systems like hyangchal, gugyeol, and idu.
• Most historical linguists classify Korean as an isolate—a language with no known relationship to any other languages while some consider it to be in the controversial Altaic language family.
• Korean has numerous small local dialects (called mal (말) ["speech"], saturi (사투리), or bang'eon (방언) in Korean). The standard language (pyojuneo or pyojunmal) of both South Korea and North Korea is based on the dialect of Seoul.

 관용은 미덕이다. 군자에 필요 불가결한 미덕이다  

Tolerance is a virtue. For noble men, it is an essential and indispensible virtue. 

- Yi Kwang-Su (Writer, 1892-1950).

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