Happy New Year (Redux)

This weekend saw the coming of the New Year once again, this time according to the lunar calendar, and with it celebrations in Korea. The holiday is called seollal in Korean and people mark it in several different ways. I was fortunate enough to be invited, along with my other waygukin friends, to the house of our Korean friend, Kang Jung-hoon. Kang’s father was in Qatar on business, so his mother hadn’t planned a big, traditional observance, and therefore no one was dressed in the hanbok. Kang and his sister are also too old for the sebae tradition where children bow before their elders and show deference to them, for which they receive money; most of my students said that they usually got around 100,000 won. However, we did partake in a few traditions. First, we ate ddeokguk, a soup made of rice cake and scallions in a broth to which we added seaweed, egg gidan, sesame seeds, and ground beef, and afterwards we played yut nori, a game wherein in players toss four wooden sticks into the air to determine the movements of four playing pieces around a board. In our “battle of the sexes,” the men defeated the women and split the small wager we had made.

Several weeks ago, Jessica purchased a bokjori (a “scoop” of sorts made from woven bamboo mesh) from a door-to-door salesman, mostly because he made an attempt to deliver his spiel in English even though he clearly didn’t speak it.

During seollal the bokjori is hung on the door outside the house in order to collect good luck for the coming year. Unfortunately, we don’t have any way of affixing it to our door, so it looks like we won’t be having any good luck this year. Another seollal tradition we ignored was moving our shoes out of the entryway and into our bedrooms so that wandering ghosts wouldn’t abscond with them.

As each year on the lunar calendar is represented by an animal, this year is the year of the pig. Many in Korea (and perhaps elsewhere) believe that this is a particularly special year of the pig in that it coincides with the year of the gold element, therefore making this the year of the Golden Pig, an especially lucky year that only comes around every 600 or so years. Plastic, golden piggy banks of all sizes (some are really quite large!) have been on sale in shops throughout the country for months now, which means that some corporation is making a killing off of the Golden Pig marketing scheme. Supposedly, it is also a good year to have children as they will grow up to be intelligent and successful. Our friend Young-woo, who was married only last year, hopes to have a child this year for this very reason (although, his wife may feel differently). In anticipation of this year, Korean wedding halls were booked far in advance in 2006. However, there seems to be some controversy over whether this is indeed the year of the Golden Pig, and even if such a year has existed in history or whether it is a more modern invention. Apparently, some skeptics believe that it may all be a ruse by the Korean government to encourage procreation as they are starting to worry about the declining birth rate. Whatever the case may actually be, I prefer to be optimistic and believe that it is indeed the year of Golden Pig, although personally I don’t plan on having children any time soon.