Why Koreans Bow to Their Elders on New Year's Day — and Get Paid for It

The New Year My Hanbok Stopped Fitting

There's a specific kind of childhood memory that only makes sense when you're an adult. Mine involves a hanbok that was slightly too tight across the shoulders, a living room rearranged so that the adults could sit in a row against the wall, and the particular silence that falls in a Korean household just before the bowing starts.

It was Seollal (설날) — Korean Lunar New Year — and I was probably seven or eight. My job was simple: bow correctly, say the right words, and receive the envelope. The envelope was the point, obviously. But even then, underneath the mercenary calculation of a child counting how many relatives were in the room, there was something else happening. Something that felt old and serious and mine in a way I couldn't articulate.

That feeling is what Seollal is actually about. Not the money — though the money is very welcome — but the act of stopping. Of gathering. Of doing something your grandparents did, and their grandparents before them, and knowing that the doing of it connects you to all of that.

Korea has two major traditional holidays. Seollal (설날), Lunar New Year, falls in late January or early February. Chuseok (추석), the autumn harvest festival, falls in September or October. Both involve travel, family gatherings, ancestral rites, and traditional food. But Seollal, with its emphasis on the new year, on fresh starts and family hierarchy, carries a particular weight — and a particular set of rituals that are unlike anything in the Western calendar.

The Seollal table (설날 상) — tteokguk, jeon, and ancestral offering foods — is the centre of the Korean Lunar New Year celebration.

What Seollal Actually Is

Seollal is the first day of the Korean lunar calendar — a date that shifts on the Western calendar each year but typically falls between late January and mid-February. Unlike January 1st, which in Korea (as in most of the world) is marked with fireworks and then immediately forgotten, Seollal is a three-day national holiday that reshapes the entire country.

The scale of movement that happens around Seollal is staggering. Korea has a strong culture of returning to one's hometown — gohyang (고향) — for major holidays, and Seollal triggers one of the largest annual human migrations in the world. The motorways clog. Train tickets sell out within minutes of going on sale, sometimes months in advance. The KTX from Seoul to Busan, normally an efficient two-hour journey, can stretch to four or five hours on Seollal travel days as the volume of people simply overwhelms the infrastructure.

I experience this from the Yongin end — watching the roads fill up, hearing from colleagues in Siheung about the journeys they're about to make — and even at a remove, the collective energy of it is palpable. The whole country is moving at once, pulled by the same gravity.

Charye: The Ancestral Rite

Before the bowing, before the food, before anything else — there is charye (차례).

Charye is an ancestral memorial rite performed on the morning of Seollal, a ritual offering of food and drink to deceased family members. A low table is set with carefully prepared dishes — rice, soup, meat, fish, vegetables, fruit, rice wine — arranged according to specific traditional rules that vary by region and family. The family gathers, the offerings are made, and the ancestors are invited to eat first.

To Western eyes, this can seem startling — setting a table for people who are no longer alive. But in Korean culture, the relationship between the living and the dead doesn't end at death. Ancestors remain part of the family, deserving of respect and remembrance. Charye is the formal expression of that belief: we remember you, we honour you, we haven't moved on without you.

After the charye, the food from the offering table is shared among the living family members. There's something quietly profound about that — eating together with the understanding that the table was first set for those who came before you.

Sebae: The Bow That Comes With an Envelope

After charye comes the part I remember most vividly from childhood: sebae (세배).

Sebae is the formal New Year's bow performed by younger family members to their elders. It's a full prostration — knees on the floor, hands placed together, forehead lowered toward the ground — accompanied by the phrase "새해 복 많이 받으세요" (saehae bok mani badeuseyo): "Please receive many blessings in the new year." The elders respond with good wishes for health, success, and happiness in the year ahead.

And then they hand over the envelope.

Sebaedon (세뱃돈) — New Year's money — is the part of Seollal that every Korean child understands with crystalline clarity. The amount varies by family and by the relative's means, but the ritual is consistent: bow correctly, receive the blessing, receive the envelope. The envelopes accumulate over the course of the day as you move through grandparents, aunts, uncles, and older cousins.

I remember the arithmetic of it. Counting the envelopes. Calculating the total. Negotiating with my parents about how much I could spend versus how much had to go into savings. The money was real and it mattered. But so did the bow. Even as a child, I understood that the bow wasn't just payment for the envelope. It was the actual point — the moment of connection between generations that the envelope was wrapped around.

These days, as an adult, I'm on the other side of that exchange. No more envelopes for me. Now I'm the one handing them out — to my daughter, and before long, to two children. The mathematics have reversed entirely.

Tteokguk: You Have to Eat It

Seollal has a mandatory dish. There's no negotiating this.

Tteokguk (떡국) — rice cake soup — is eaten on the morning of Seollal, and eating it is how you gain a year of age in the Korean age system. The tteok (떡) used in tteokguk are long cylindrical rice cakes sliced into oval coins — the shape deliberately echoes traditional Korean currency, a wish for prosperity in the year ahead. The broth is typically made from beef or chicken, clear and clean-tasting, with egg and garnishes added on top.

The connection between tteokguk and aging leads to one of the most common Seollal questions children ask: "How many bowls of tteokguk do I have to eat to get older faster?" The answer is one. Just one. But it has to be on Seollal morning.

Beyond tteokguk, the Seollal table is filled with jeon (전) — pan-fried savoury pancakes made from vegetables, seafood, or meat — and various namul (나물) side dishes. The preparation of this food is traditionally enormous in scale and falls, in most families, predominantly on the women. This has been a source of genuine tension in Korean families for generations — the labour of Seollal is unevenly distributed, and younger generations are increasingly vocal about it. It's one of those areas where tradition and modern expectations are in active negotiation.

Chuseok: The Autumn Counterpart

If Seollal is the new year gathering, Chuseok (추석) is its autumn mirror. Falling on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month — typically September or October — Chuseok is often described as Korean Thanksgiving, though the comparison only goes so far.

Like Seollal, Chuseok involves returning to hometowns, performing ancestral rites, and gathering around a table of traditional food. The signature dish is songpyeon (송편) — half-moon shaped rice cakes filled with sesame, red bean, or chestnut, steamed over pine needles that give them a subtle, foresty fragrance. Families traditionally make songpyeon together, and there's a folk belief that the more beautifully you shape your songpyeon, the more beautiful your children will be — which means the kitchen on Chuseok eve tends to be both competitive and chaotic.

Chuseok also involves beolcho (벌초) — visiting and tending ancestral graves, clearing away overgrown grass before the holiday. It's a practice that has declined in urban families but remains important in rural areas, a physical act of remembrance that complements the ritual of charye.

The two holidays together — Seollal and Chuseok — form the backbone of the Korean ceremonial year. Everything else orbits around them.

Sebae (세배) — the formal New Year's bow — is performed by younger family members to their elders on the morning of Seollal.

What Seollal Feels Like Now

The first Seollal after my daughter was born had a different quality to it. She was too young to understand any of it — too young for sebae, too young for tteokguk, too young for the ancestral rite. But she was there, passed between grandparents and aunts and uncles, absorbed into the gathering the way babies get absorbed into things: completely, without effort, as if she'd always been part of it.

I thought about my own childhood Seollals. The tight hanbok. The row of adults against the wall. The envelopes. The tteokguk eaten at a low table with the television on in the background. The way the day always felt both very ordinary and faintly ceremonial at the same time.

I thought about the Seollals I missed, growing up in Nottingham — years when the lunar new year passed without charye or sebae or tteokguk, when it was just another January day. The gap between those two experiences is part of who I am, and Seollal is one of the places where I feel it most clearly.

My daughter will grow up with both sides of that. She'll bow to her grandparents. She'll receive envelopes. She'll eat tteokguk on the correct morning. And one day, when she's old enough to ask why, I'll have an answer ready.

Because this is what we do. Because the people before us did it. Because stopping once a year to bow and eat and remember is not a small thing, even when it looks like one.

This post is part of a series on Korean cultural traditions. If you're curious about the hanbok worn during Seollal and other occasions, you might enjoy this post on why Koreans still wear hanbok. I'll also be writing soon about Korean weddings and what a modern Korean wedding actually looks like.

---

📦 About The Haru Box

The Haru Box is written by David — a Korean-British writer based in Yongin, South Korea. Born in Korea, raised in Nottingham, and returned after university, David writes about the everyday details of Korean life that don't make it into the guidebooks. New posts every week or two. If something here made you think, feel free to explore more below.