Chuseok : Korea's Harvest Moon Homecoming. Warm memories of my mother.
From today, Korea slips into its Chuseok holiday — and if you're in Seoul, you can feel the city exhale.
Highways clog with cars, train stations overflow with families dragging gift boxes, and airports fill with people flying home.
Millions leave the capital in a matter of days, all converging on one place : home.
Meanwhile, back in Seoul : for the people who stay behind — the international residents, the solo city-dwellers, or those simply not traveling this year — Chuseok has its own quiet magic.
It's one of the rare windows when Seoul feels almost peaceful, a good time to actually enjoy the city rather than fight through it.
So what exactly is Chuseok?
Chuseok (추석), sometimes called Korean Thanksgiving, falls on the 15th day of the 8th lunar month — the night of the full harvest moon. At its heart, it's a festival of gratitude : gratitude for the harvest, and gratitude to the ancestors who made that harvest, and everything else, possible.
Three threads run through the holiday :
1. Coming home. Chuseok is less a single day than a pilgrimage. Korea's roads turn into rivers of red taillights as people return to their hometowns — usually their father's side of the family, in the traditional structure — to be with parents, grandparents, siblings, and cousins they might not see the rest of the year.
The Korean word for this migration, gwihyang (귀향), literally means "returning to one's hometown."
2. Honoring the ancestors. Early on the morning of Chuseok, families perform charye (차례) — a memorial rite held in the home, where food made from the new harvest is set on a table for deceased parents and grandparents.
Rice made from freshly harvested grain, fruit, and Songpyeon are arranged with real formality, and the eldest son's household — the keunjip (큰집) — usually hosts. Afterward, many families visit ancestral graves to tidy the site and pay respects in person, a practice called seongmyo (성묘).
3. Songpyeon and the harvest table. The signature food of the holiday is Songpyeon (송편) — half-moon-shaped rice cakes stuffed with sweetened sesame, red beans, chestnuts, or black beans, then steamed over a bed of pine needles, which perfume the rice with a faint resin sweetness. Made together, by hand, Songpyeon-making is as much a family ritual as an act of cooking — generations sitting around a table, pressing rice dough into shape while trading stories.
And then there's the moon itself. Chuseok falls on the night the moon is at its fullest and roundest, and that fullness has always doubled as a symbol — of abundance, completeness, and family wholeness. Children traditionally wore hanbok, played folk games like ganggangsullae (a circle dance under the moonlight), and wished on the moon for good fortune.
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(This is a video I watched during Chuseok a few years ago.)
My warm memory of Songpyeon and Pine Needles 💖
Whenever the air turns crisp and Chuseok draws near, my mind drifts back — all the way to the late 1950s, to the house I grew up in.
In those days, preparation started weeks in advance.
My family would send a hired hand to shake jujubes down from the ancient trees along the edge of our field, and someone would climb the hills to gather wild chestnuts.
My grandmother sat in the outer yard threshing sesame and beans laid out to dry, sorting them into baskets.
My mother, ahead of the main rice harvest, would cut a portion of the earliest-ripening stalks in the paddy just to have fresh new rice ready for the holiday table.
She worked outside all day and then, by the light of an oil lamp at night, carefully mended and prepared the clothes we'd all wear for the holiday.
Watching her either sew a brand-new hanbok for me or press an old one back into shape, I — still a small child lying in bed — would be too excited to fall asleep.
Nobody had to ask me — I'd run off with the neighborhood kids to the hill behind my house to gather pine needles, the ones that would perfume the Songpyeon as they steamed.
I remember bragging to my friends about how much Songpyeon my home was going to make that year, as if it were a competition.
Then, finally, the day would come when the whole family sat down together to knead the rice dough and shape the Songpyeon — filling them with sweet black beans, cowpeas, chestnuts, sesame...
With my small child's hands, I'd try to shape mine as neatly and prettily as I could, mimicking the adults, or sometimes just playing — sneaking in a lump of dough shaped like an animal instead.
Finally, the day of Chuseok arrived. Since our family was the head household , many relatives gathered at our home to hold ancestral memorial rites.
All those relatives gathered, all that food laid out — it was more than enough to thrill a small child.
Even better, I remember being dressed in a yellow Jeogori and a red skirt my mother had made by hand, with striped rainbow socks she'd bought me at the market.
I can still picture my own footsteps — walking proudly through the whole neighborhood, hoping someone would notice how pretty I looked in my hanbok.
I also remember, vividly, sitting beside my younger sibling in our hanbok to have our photograph taken.
My mother had brought over a relative — one of the few people back then who actually owned a camera — and had us sit for a portrait in a corner of the yard.
Even now, looking at that old black-and-white photograph from a time that feels impossibly distant, something in my chest tightens.
My father mostly kept to the men's quarters, absorbed in books and played Baduk (Go), indifferent to the household's daily grind.
My mother, as the eldest daughter-in-law of the family's head household, carried the whole extended family more or less alone, worn down in ways both physical and emotional.
And yet — in that one instant, looking at her two late-born children sitting side by side in the Hanbok she'd made with her own hands —
I hope, only now, that something in her bloomed too.
I hope that moment, at least, brought her something like happiness in her heart.
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