Well what do you know. Chuseok came and went as quietly as the tides. The harvest full moon hang in the night in its full glory, which kept me up for the most part of the night too.
I remember, a few years back, visiting my Korean inlaws during the holidays was a massive ordeal, which my Korean spouse did not relish in engaging. Korea has very specific traditions regarding family strucutres which would take pages to describe and I will not attempt, but I will try to summarize the one pertaining to holidays like Thanksgiving and the Lunar New year and the extended family.
When a Korean woman marries, she essentially marries into her husbands family. In many cases that means that she no longer spends time with her own parents and family during those particular holidas and instead only visits her husband's family's household. Korean traditions dictate that part of each celebration is devoted to the worshipping of the ancestral forefathers, this either entails going out to visit the ancestral graves or preparing large quantities of traditional dishes in order to perform the worship at home. Often times its both.
As the worship usually takes place early in the morning, women, who are the ones tending to the coulinary preparations, get to start the day prior to the holiday, and continue early in the morning as once the food is cooked, it now has to be placed on ceremonial dishes for display.
The daughter in-law plays an integral part of this "symbiotic" relationship and in some cases, for the really unlucky ones, the kitchen is the only place during these celebrations. Granted, things are changing, but I would not be at all surprised to find women huddled in kitchen corners to this day, hunched over steaming pots of soups, and pans of grilled meats, while the man get ready to perform the ceremony.
While women play an essential role in the preparation of the foods, their role in the worship is virtually none existent, other than being there to bring the food and then to pick it up once the ceremony is completed. AGAIN. This is not the standard, and I would like to say that my inlawas are the most liberal people when it comes to these things, AND many others, but I bet you my lucky Canadian loony, you could find plenty of such cases to justify my mention here.
The men play a much more physical role, so to speak. The buddhist tradition requires a lot of bowing, and by bowing I don't mean a nodding of your head, or even your upper torso, no no. It's a full on down to your knees, head to the floor kind of bow, twice in a row, 5 or 6 times throughout the ceremony. The last part does depend on the number of men present during the worship service as each man, according to their age, takes his turn in bowing to the alter, and sharing some of the food laid out with the ghosts of the past. Each such interval is then followed by two more bows done by all of the men present, until every man had his turn.
Once completed, the tables are cleared, then decked once more with the morning breakfast. In the past men and women ate separately, at different tables. Women ate with the children while men enjoyed themselves on their own terms. Women did the clearning as well. That in essence is the abreviated version of the two most important holidays in South Korea.
In the past my father in law, who is the oldest living man in the family of a number of relatives, my younger brother in-law and I, would set out to drive across the city and to other cities, in order to visit other family members and on occasions to perform the very same ceremony. Things have changed however, as people get on with age. Some are no longer with us, and others, well, I don't know what happened with others.....but....
Let me bring you back to my initial point of the daughter in-law. On account of the fact that I, a westerner living in South Kroea, do not carry the "burden" of a traditional Korean family, my wife is not expected to perform any of the above mentioned responsibilities. The only part that she honestly partook in as a married woman was in the priviledge of not having to be present during these festivities. These were the times when we took our two children and traveled to places like Thailand, Malaysia and the Phillippines, all prior to the year 2019, of course.
This year, however, we did visit my inlaws, and spent a wonderful, extended holiday debouching in the presence of free time and family. For me personally, this was almost as relaxing, if not more than visiting the sandy beaches of Koh Samui, of which I am sure I will tell you some time soon.
I have started recording these memories, in the form of videos and written blogs, because I found that the simple act of picture taking simply jamms up my hard drives which quite often serve no other purpose than to hold up my desk reading lamp while I bask in its light looking up at the webcam during the live stream of my podcast.
This year I seem to have forgotten the reason for why I began to create vlogs, which thanks to this post, and the picture of my son 8, on the left and his one year younger cousing on the right, allowed me to redeam