추석

The word chuseok joins two Sino-Korean syllables: chu (秋, autumn) and seok (夕, evening). The twelfth-century chronicle Samguk Sagi, compiled by Kim Busik in 1145, places the holiday's origin in the reign of the Silla king Yuri, who ruled from 24 to 57 CE. Court ladies were divided into two teams and spent a month weaving cloth in competition. The losing side hosted a feast and sang the song Hoeso-gok, and that banquet, held under the fullest moon of autumn, became the first Chuseok.

By the Goryeo period (918-1392), Chuseok had moved from palace ceremony into the farming villages of the peninsula. Families gathered on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, when the full moon rises largest and brightest. They shaped songpyeon, half-moon rice cakes filled with sesame, honey, or red beans, then steamed them over beds of pine needles. The pine scent is still considered essential: a rice cake prepared without it is not a Chuseok rice cake.

The Joseon Dynasty (1392-1897) set Chuseok among the three great national observances, alongside Seollal and Dano. Confucian ancestor veneration, called charye, became the ceremony's center. Families arranged elaborate food offerings before spirit tablets and performed deep bows in a precise sequence, with the eldest son leading. The holiday absorbed these ritual layers and became inseparable from the ideas of filial duty and the continued presence of the dead among the living.

When Korea urbanized after the 1960s, Chuseok acquired a new dimension: the mass homecoming. Millions who had moved to Seoul traveled back to ancestral villages, creating what Koreans call the minjok daeidon, the folk migration. Traffic jams stretched three hundred kilometers. The word entered English-language dictionaries in the 1990s, defined as the Korean Thanksgiving, though the comparison misses the lunar calendar, the rice cakes, and the weight of the ancestors.