Picture the last hour of a good Thanksgiving. The plates have migrated to the middle of the table, somebody has found the game, and pie is a decision for later. The Detroit Lions have hosted a Thanksgiving game every year since 1945 and the Cowboys have played one since 1966, so for plenty of families the football is as fixed as the turkey.
Now move the clock to Chuseok, Korea's harvest holiday, which ran September 24 to 26 this year. Some families are on a hillside pulling weeds from around a grave. Others are stuck in traffic, one of roughly 31 million travelers the Korea Transport Institute expected over the holiday, with the drive from Seoul to Busan forecast to take as long as ten and a half hours on the worst outbound morning.
At the dinner table the two holidays look closer than you'd guess. It's the afternoon where they part ways.
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| Two harvest tables in one frame: songpyeon for Chuseok, turkey for Thanksgiving. |
What Chuseok Families Do While Thanksgiving Families Watch Football
After a Thanksgiving dinner, the family mostly stays put, with football on and leftovers to plan. After a Chuseok meal, many Korean families head outside, to the graves of their ancestors.
That doesn't mean Chuseok skips the sports. Ssireum, Korean wrestling, is described as the most popular sport played at Chuseok, and the winner of a big tournament is crowned Cheonha Jangsa and receives a bull and a kilogram of rice. A plate of pie looks modest next to that. Under the full moon, women in hanbok traditionally form a circle for ganggangsullae (강강술래), holding hands and singing as they dance.
The meal itself has a different shape. Chuseok begins with charye (차례), a memorial rite in which food is offered to the ancestors. In one lineage household documented by the National Folk Museum of Korea, the family waits outside for about as long as it takes to eat nine spoonfuls of food while the ancestors have their meal, and then rice tea is served. Afterward the family eats from those same dishes in a custom called eumbok (음복), and the head of the lineage drinks first, with everyone else following in order of age or place in the family tree.
Grave visits, called seongmyo (성묘), are the other big Chuseok errand, and they often include beolcho (벌초), clearing weeds from around the tombs. People bring food and drink to leave there. If you want an American frame, think of a Memorial Day cemetery visit folded into Thanksgiving weekend.
Back in the States, the next morning is Black Friday, when the shopping season starts in earnest. Retail has shaped the holiday itself: in 1939 Franklin Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving up to the fourth Thursday to lengthen the Christmas shopping season during the Depression, and Congress made that the law in 1941.
Not every Korean family keeps all of this up. Younger generations are simplifying the rituals, meeting at restaurants, or skipping charye for religious reasons, so the Chuseok in a grandmother's telling can look quite different from the one many younger families keep.
A Turkey Table and a Rulebook Table
A Thanksgiving table is organized around a turkey. A Chuseok table begins as an offering: jeon, vegetables, fish, dates and seasonal fruit such as apples and pears go out under strict placement rules before anyone picks up chopsticks.
Not everyone follows the rulebook that closely anymore. Some younger cooks give the ritual table a trendy update instead of dropping it altogether, and whatever strictness is left comes from the fact that the first guests at this table are the ancestors.
A Half-Moon Rice Cake That Doubles as a Fortune Test
Songpyeon (송편) is the Chuseok rice cake, folded into a half-moon around a filling of sesame, chestnut or sweet red bean and steamed on a bed of pine needles that leaves a piney scent in the dough. Families traditionally make it from freshly harvested rice, which ties it to this holiday, and batches get shared with friends and neighbors, so a plate of songpyeon often leaves the house.
The half-moon shape carries a message. A full moon can only shrink, while a half moon is still filling, so the shape stands for abundance.
Then comes the part you'll want to bring up at your own table. Folk belief says that whoever shapes beautiful songpyeon will meet a good spouse or have a beautiful baby. That turns a roomful of relatives pinching seams in sticky dough into a very public performance review.
Fillings change with the region. Gangwon makes them with potato, Chungcheong with pumpkin, Gyeongsang with seafood and Jeolla with fermented skate. Pumpkin should sound familiar to anyone who has ever cut into a Thanksgiving pie. Fermented skate will not.
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| Songpyeon steams over pine needles, which give the rice cakes their scent. |
Two Governments Agree on the Two-Hour Rule for Leftovers
Both countries give the same first instruction once dinner ends: cooked food should not sit out for more than two hours. After that, the leftovers look nothing alike, because one holiday leaves you with a bird and the other leaves you with dozens of small dishes.
For Thanksgiving, the USDA says cooked turkey and its trimmings keep for three to four days in the fridge, and plain turkey pieces can go in the freezer for about four months, or roughly six months if they're packed with broth or gravy. That's your sandwich window. The USDA also wants leftovers stored promptly in shallow containers.
Korea's Ministry of Food and Drug Safety gives more dish-by-dish advice this year. It says to cool food quickly, divide it into wide, shallow containers and skip cooling hot pots out on the balcony. Jeon, the pan-fried vegetables and fish that fill a Chuseok table, gets portioned into meal-size amounts. Seasoned vegetables called namul last about three days in the fridge. Songpyeon goes in the freezer, because refrigeration hardens it fast. Braised short ribs (galbijjim) and bulgogi get divided too and frozen at minus 18 degrees Celsius or colder, and raw fish and meat stay on a lower shelf than the cooked dishes so nothing drips onto them.
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| After the meal comes the packing: jeon in meal-size portions, songpyeon for the freezer. |
The Road Home Is Part of the Holiday
Chuseok is also one of the biggest travel events of the Korean year, with flights that tend to sell out about three months ahead. The Korea Transport Institute expected 30.93 million travelers this year, about 3.5 percent fewer than last year, and the government set September 23 to 27 as a special transport management period. Daily highway traffic was projected at 6.05 million vehicles, up 11.8 percent, with the worst outbound crush on the morning of the 24th and the worst return on the afternoon of the 25th.
Congestion during the holiday can run up to three times higher than usual, and trains, buses and flights fill to capacity. That's a lot of asphalt for a three-day holiday. Seoul to Busan could stretch to ten and a half hours outbound and nine on the return, which is a long time to keep a car of relatives from arguing about the playlist.
Americans do this too. AAA projected a record 81.8 million people traveling over Thanksgiving in 2025. The American number is bigger, as you'd expect from a bigger country.
Who Does the Cooking Is Where Chuseok Gets Complicated
In a traditional Chuseok, most of the cooking falls to the women of the family, and the Korean press has a nickname for the holiday because of it: Daughter-in-law Labor Day.
At the lineage household the National Folk Museum documented, food preparation starts two to three days ahead, directed by the heir's wife with women relatives helping, and the house often works through the night before. One 2025 survey of more than 800 women found that eight in ten felt physically and mentally worn out after holidays, with cooking and housework as the main stress. A 2020 Seoul Foundation survey of 810 people asked whether holidays had become more gender-equal, and the two halves of the sample answered very differently: women averaged 46.1 points on the equality question and men averaged 70.1.
Things are moving. Campaigns since 2015 have encouraged men to take on holiday chores, and younger families simplify or eat out. I couldn't find Thanksgiving numbers to set beside these, so I won't pretend the gap has been measured.
One Holiday Arrives Before the Harvest and the Other After
Calling Chuseok "Korean Thanksgiving" gets the harvest and the family meal right and leaves out the ancestors. Chuseok lands before the rice is cut, and Thanksgiving lands after the harvest is in. That timing explains most of the mood: Chuseok gives thanks for getting through a hard season and hopes for a good harvest to come, and it also honors the ancestors, which Thanksgiving does not.
The dates work differently, too. Chuseok falls on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month, a full moon, which was September 25 this year. Thanksgiving is the fourth Thursday in November, a rule Congress fixed in 1941, and this year that's November 26. Because Chuseok follows the moon, it wanders around the calendar: last year the travel rush peaked on October 5 and 6. Canadians celebrate on October 12, the second Monday of the month, which puts their holiday closer to Chuseok on the calendar than the American one.
This Chuseok, the rice was still standing in the fields. By the time the Thanksgiving dishes are cleared on November 26, the harvest will be long in and somebody will have found the game.
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