Korean New Years 2021
- Feb 21, 2021
- 2 min read
The Lunar New Year’s Day, also known as Seollal (설날) in Korean, is one of the most important and celebrated Korean holidays. Koreans celebrate this holiday three days from the last night of the previous year. To celebrate this new year day, Korean family members and relatives gather together. They eat Korean traditional dishes, wear Hanbok (Korean traditional clothing), play folk games, and perform rites to respect elders and memorize ancestors.
To make this holiday special, people prepare rice, soup, meat, noodles, fruit, vegetables, and liquor. These are some of the common dishes: manduguk (dumpling soup), kimchi mandu (kimchi dumpling), bulgogi (barbecue beef), galbi jjim (braised beef short ribs), japchae (vegetable noodles), jeon (pan-fried fritter), and soju (Korean alcohol).
In fact, ddeokguk (rice cake soup) is the most recognized food among all foods and is always prepared for the holiday. There exists a traditional belief that you gain an age on the Lunar calendar birthday after finishing a bowl of ddeokguk. Children are especially excited to eat rice cake soup to become mature. Many people spend days preparing for the feast of various foods on Seollal.
There are many folk games and activities that adults and children enjoy together during Seollal. Arguably, the most popular game is Yutnori (윷놀이). Yutnori is a board game played with four sticks and four game pieces for each player or team. These sticks have a flat side and a round side, which creates 5 different landing combinations to determine how many dots a player can advance on the board.
The first person or team to get all four of their game pieces back to the starting dot wins the game. Other popular activities that many Koreans do on this holiday include kite-flying known as yeon (연) and jegichagi (제기차기) which is similar to hacky sack.
Many children highly anticipate Seollal because they can get money from their parents and relatives after they perform sebae (세배), which is a traditional bow given to their elders, including parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles, to wish them a happy new year. This is a ritual to show filial piety. In return, the adults give the children new year’s money. Traditional hanboks sometimes have fabric pouches, called bokjumeoni (복주머니) which translates to “luck pockets”, that are attached to the clothing. The new year’s money is stored in these small pouches. I remember myself as a little child waiting for Seollal, as American children Santa Claus on Christmas for the big fortune I would have earned after sebae.
Seollal is a celebration full of happiness and symbolizes a good start of the new year. So for this year’s Seollal, let us hope that the coronavirus pandemic will come to an end and that 2021 will be a great year.
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