![]() ![]() According to a Korean superstition, eating more tteokguk during Seollal will bring abundance and good luck, as well as add another year to one’s life. Tteok mandu guk | Photo courtesy of MDK NoodlesĪsk any Korean what makes Seollal “Seollal”, and the first words out of their mouth will be, “tteokguk.” A rice cake soup, tteokguk is to Seollal as turkey is to Thanksgiving. Here are six traditional Korean Lunar New Year dishes to try this week and beyond: The surest way to fall in love with a culture’s traditions is to share in their holidays, so this year I set out to make the most of my Seollal celebrations, learning which dishes are most significant to the holiday and where to find their best versions in Koreatown. Here, I can sample the tastes of my motherland-her flavors, customs, and language-and feel a bit closer to my Korean heritage. The greater LA area is home to the largest Korean population outside of Korea, so, for me, living here feels like the next best thing to moving across the world. Many Korean Americans will spend the holiday working, especially those who work in the restaurant industry and are hoping to fulfill large, holiday orders.Īs a resident of LA’s Koreatown for nearly three years, I’m lucky to live in an area where being Korean feels ordinary or, sometimes, even fun. The lunar holiday will largely be celebrated within households or over Zoom or KakaoTalk, a South Korean messaging app. Much like 2020’s Christmas, Halloween, and Independence Day, Seollal’s long-awaited, perfectly timed holiday weekend has been thwarted by the pandemic. Here in the US, absent federal days off, Koreans and Korean Americans fit their celebrations in however they can: feasting on delicious food, making offerings to ancestors, spending time with extended family, and generously exchanging gifts, especially expensive fruits, all to welcome a new and hopefully prosperous year. In Korea, Seollal is a national holiday lasting three days, with most Koreans given time off work so that they can gather with family. ![]() Seollal is celebrated on the second new moon after the winter solstice, this year falling on February 12. Decades later, only a few memories stand out: playing yutnori, a game that involved painted sticks wearing hanbok, a traditional Korean dress and, most memorably, bowing to elders in exchange for money, or sebae. As a Korean-American adoptee raised by a white family in the Midwest, my Korean holiday celebrations were limited to annual Korean heritage events for Korean-American adoptees. Until recently, my understanding of Seollal, or Korean Lunar New Year, was limited to the more popular Chinese Lunar New Year traditions. ![]()
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