Seollal (New Year's Day)

Koreans celebrate both the Western solar-calendar New Year (on January 1)—like the Japanese, and which they sometimes call Japanese New Year—and the Chinese lunar-calendar New Year, which they call Seollal 설날. (The etymology of seol, which is not of Chinese origin, is unclear.)

This year Seollal is today, February 19, a Thursday. There is a three-day holiday centered around Seollal, so we end up with a five-day weekend.

It is traditional to spend Seollal with family. Although there is a lot of social and geographic mobility in Korea these days, there remains a strong traditional notion in the culture that for a family gathering one returns to the ancestral home town where the parents live. Increasingly this is more true in the geography of the mind than in reality. But it is still the case that millions of young people and young families leave the capital, Seoul, and head out the hinterlands to pass the holiday.

Demographically, our apartment complex is heavily tilted toward elderly residents. There is a family across the hall from us with small children, but other than them I've almost exclusively seen grandparent-age people living around us. Starting yesterday, however, there has been a huge influx of families with small kids arriving and jamming up the parking lots. The unfamiliar sounds of children laughing and screaming can be heard echoing around outside.

Today the playground at the apartment complex was busier than usual—meaning we were not the only ones there.

Tek is doing some botanical investigation.

It is traditional on Seol to eat tteokguk 떡국, soup with glutinous rice cakes in it. Though it is usually eaten for breakfast, we had it instead for lunch.

Our tteokguk

This version is flavored with strips of fried egg, scallions, shredded beef, gim 김 seaweed, and mandu 만두 饅頭 (a stuffed dumpling, equivalent to Chinese and Japanese 餃子).

The last gift to arrive at the house before the holiday was yugwa 유과 油菓, a very fluffy glutinous-rice confection. (For some of the other holiday gifts that arrived, see here and here and here.)

Yugwa

Before lunch we did the traditional jeol 절, the deep bow that family members make to their seated elders to give and receive New Year blessings. Lance and Erma bowed to Erma's parents, and then (after much cajoling) Tek bowed to his grandparents and parents, after which he received the traditional sebaetdon 세뱃돈 gift of cash.

Tek receives his sebaetdon properly, with two hands.

Notably absent are firecrackers, a mainstay of Chinese New Year celebrations that I've experienced in both mainland China and Taiwan. It's certainly more pleasant without them.