Also called Hangawi, Korean harvest festival, charye, seongmyo
Chuseok is Korea's harvest festival on the full moon of the eighth lunar month. Families give thanks to their ancestors with a morning charye table of new-harvest food, tend the family graves, and make half-moon rice cakes called songpyeon for a bright future.
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Take care: Charye is a family rite of memory, so honour your own ancestors rather than performing it for strangers' families, and follow your family's religious choices. Use clean, food-safe pine needles that have not been sprayed. Take care with hot steam when lifting the cakes.
Popular belief traces Chuseok to gabae, a month-long weaving contest between two teams of women under the third Silla king. On the full moon of the eighth month the losing team treated the winners to a feast, with songs and games.
Women in hanbok join hands in a large circle under the Chuseok moon and sing as they dance, with a lead singer and a repeated refrain. The dance is strongest in the southwest coastal province of Jeolla.
Many Protestant families hold a prayer and memorial meal instead of bowing to a table, while the Catholic Church has allowed ancestral rites as a civil custom since 1939. The 2022 Sungkyunkwan guidance encouraged a lighter table to ease the heavy cooking burden that usually fell on women.
Chuseok, also called Hangawi, falls on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month at the full moon. In South Korea it is a three-day holiday, and millions travel to their home towns. Popular belief links it to gabae, a weaving contest held in the kingdom of Silla, while many scholars see older harvest-moon rites to local gods and ancestors behind it. The two central customs are charye, the morning memorial rite at home, and seongmyo, the visit to the family graves.
The arrangement of the charye table follows Confucian ritual books adopted in the early Joseon dynasty, with rice and soup at the north and fruit at the south, though it varies by region. Songpyeon are steamed on pine needles, which gives them their name. A Three Kingdoms legend about a full moon and a half moon on a turtle's shell made the half-moon shape a sign of a growing future. In 2022 the Sungkyunkwan rites committee published a simplified nine-item table.
The Harvest Moon is the full moon closest to the September equinox, so it usually falls in September and sometimes in early October. For a few nights around it the moon rises soon after sunset, giving farmers extra evening light, and its rite is a harvest gratitude meal.
Setting a table of round foods, mooncakes and fruit under the full moon of the eighth lunar month to honor the moon and Chang'e and to pray for the family to be whole.
A Japanese autumn custom of setting out rice dumplings, pampas grass and harvest produce for the full moon and sitting quietly to admire it.
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