Hello there, it's been a while since our last journal entry. Hope all of you have been well!
세월 참 빠르네요. Time really flies, it wasn't too long ago that we welcomed 2024 and now its already lunar new year!
In South Korea, the lunar new year holiday is called Seollal 설날, and similar perhaps to Chinese Lunar New Year, Seollal is one of the biggest holidays of the year. It commemorates the first day of the lunisolar calendar and is celebrated in both North and South Korea, as well as Koreans all around the world!
One main focus of the holiday is the ritual of ancestor worship (so many would try to travel back to their hometown), but there are other activities including gathering to eat together, playing games and sebae (세배) on the first day first morning, where children and younger people in the family would take turns to bow to elders and receive small gifts of money.
So what is eaten on Seollal?
The main dish is none other than tteokguk (떡국), a soup consisting of rice cakes (tteok) most commonly served in a beef based broth and typically garnished with thinly sliced egg, green onion, and meat. Some also add mandu (만두) dumplings into the soup!
Koreans believe that eating tteokguk signifies adding another year to your life and represents new beginnings in the year ahead! Other Seollal foods include jeon (전) savoury pancakes and japchae (잡재) glass noodles!
Pictured above: Home-cooked Seollal meal. Top left: Different kinds of jeon; Top right: japchae; Bottom: tteokguk
One of the yummiest meals in the year - home-cooked tteokguk with the savoury smell of beef and sesame oil!
The most common greeting for Seollal is 새해 복 많이 받으세요 (pronounced as sae-hae-bok-mani-ba-deu-se-yo). 새해 (sae-hae) means “new year,” 복 (bok) means “luck,” 많이 (mani), means many, and 받으세요 (ba-deu-se-yo), which means please receive. Simply, this greeting wishes the other party to receive lots of good luck in the year ahead!
We hope wherever you are, if you're celebrating lunar new year / Seollal, that you'll be surrounded by good food, laughter, good health and the warmth of loved ones.
While the biggest luck is often perceived and regarded as enormous material wealth, we hope the biggest luck you'll receive is good health and the warmth of love - and we wish you plentiful of that this lunar new year.