Rice Cakes & Cash Money: Lunar New Year in Korea

Koreans have it lucky. While the holiday season is over for those living in many other countries, the festivities here in Korea don’t end in January. Instead, there’s another holiday, hot on the heels of Christmas and New Year’s, to eagerly await: Seollal (설날), or the Korean New Year.

This may sound familiar to you if you’re from an Asian background. China, Vietnam, Thailand and Singapore are among the many Asian countries that celebrate the Lunar New Year, which follows the traditional Chinese lunisolar calendar and typically occurs in late January or early February. This year, the Lunar New Year falls on February 5.

While having two new year holidays may seem like all fun and games, Korean families often elect one of these to gather as a large family. Seollal is traditionally the time for this, though nowadays some families get together during Sinjeong, the “Solar New Year Holiday” on January 1, instead. Because the trips to one’s hometown to visit parents, in-laws and other relatives can take several hours, the government designated three days for the Seollal holiday: the day before, of and after.

One of the main events at these family gatherings is to pay tribute to their ancestors through a ceremony called charyae or jesa. The eldest son’s family customarily prepares an altar laden with wine, beef, fish, three different coloured vegetables, a variety of fruits, and tteok (rice cakes) or songpyeon (sweet, filled rice cakes). The shinwi (신위 or 神位), the memorial tablet that symbolizes the spirit of the ancestor, is placed at the middle. It is tradition to wear hanbok to these ceremonies, though nowadays, showing up in jeans and a nice sweater won’t brand you as a disrespectful philistine.

The tributes to families don’t end there. Another important tradition is sebae (세배 or 歲拜), where younger members of the family kneel on the ground and bow to their elders in a ritual of filial piety. They wish them, “saehae bok mani badeusaeyo” (“새해 복 많이 받으세요”) to wish them fortune in the new year. This is a lot of kids’ favourite part, because you get an envelope of money in return for your filial piety — much like the Chinese tradition of giving red envelopes, or hongbao during the Chinese New Year. Not a bad trade, if you ask me.

And finally, after celebrating your great-grandparents, your grandma, your parents and aunts and uncles, you get to celebrate yourself! Korean New Year is the birthday for all Koreans (fun fact: the legal age for clubbing in Korea is done by year of birth, not individual birthdays). Instead of cake, we get tteokguk: steaming bowls of chewy, sliced rice cakes swimming in a bone marrow broth, alongside eggs, beef and chopped spring onions. It’s said that it’s only once you eat tteokguk that you gain a year in age, and that the question “How many bowls of tteokguk have you eaten?” was a rather funny, convoluted way of asking, “How old are you?”

This seemingly simple dish belies a deeper meaning. The white colour of the tteok symbolizes purity and cleanliness, while their round, disc-like shape is meant to mimic yeopjeon, Korea’s old coin currency, and represents prosperity. It’s like the old saying goes: You are what you eat. (Though technically speaking, you’d just be a lot of dough in that case.)

Remember when I said it’s not all fun and games? That may have been a little misleading. Perhaps in an effort to keep the party going — there’s only so much you can talk about with family, right? — traditional Korean games are played during Seollal. Yutnori is the most commonly played game, and is a board game of sorts. Players are split into two teams, with each member represented by a game piece that’s moved around the board. You throw four sticks, which are rounded on one side and flat on the other, into the air, and you move your piece however many spaces, depending on which sides the sticks landed on.

So there you have it: a primer on Korean New Year, from ancestral rites to a very stripped down version of Monopoly. Just make sure to keep the tteokguk consumption to one bowl — otherwise you may find yourself hitting your thirties far sooner than you thought.