Thursday, September 24, 2009
Chosuk
The Korean holiday of Chosuk - The Full Moon or Harvest festival is coming up on October 3. This holiday travels around on the Lunar calendar, usually falling in late September. It is often compared to the American Thanksgiving, though I think it is a combination of Thanksgiving and Memorial Day. We have decided it is about time we added it to our celebrations. The tradition, as I understand it, starts with a morning ceremony of bowing in honor of the family ancestors. A special table with special foods (one being moon shaped rice cakes) is set up, and while wearing hanbok, the family bows in front of the table. After that, the family travels to their family burial place to clean it up for the year. There is a family dinner that evening. We are doing a modified version with the table and dinner happening at the same time. We are looking forward to two other families like ours, and one Korean family joining us. I am still trying to research what foods to include... more on that later.
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Hi there, I stumbled across your blog using Google. I am a 22 year old Korean transnational adoptee (like your children) and share being an adoptee from Eastern Children Welfare originally from the Jin Ju branch. I was really interested to hear about your journey to Korea : )
ReplyDeleteTraditional Choseok food always includes Songpyon-- a type of sweet rice cake that is steamed on pine needles (a neat "fact": supposedly if you can make beautiful songpyon, you will have beautiful daughters. Unfortunately if this is true, my daughters will be ugly x.x lol). Other food includes things foods made from the fall harvest and kogi (meat). There is actually a specific way to set up the Choseok table-- you can probably google it and find a decent table chart. Hope this helps a little!
Eun Joo
mishabellerock@gmail.com
Hi Eun Joo - thanks for the information. We were going to try to make songpyon, but a Korean friend thought we'd be hopeless at it and brought a beautiful platter of them. I tried to find info on setting the table and didn't find much. I tried to copy some pictures I have.
ReplyDeleteHave you been to Korea? Jinju is beautiful. I have some pictures of the lake there.