Chuseok is Korea's autumn harvest festival, celebrated at the eighth lunar month's full moon with family reunions, ancestral memorial rites called charye, and visits to family graves known as seongmyo. Families prepare songpyeon, half moon shaped rice cakes steamed over pine needles, and share a harvest meal understood as an offering of thanks for the year's crops as much as an occasion for gathering, and the holiday now anchors one of the two largest annual travel periods in South Korea alongside the Lunar New Year.
Scholars trace Chuseok's roots to ancient harvest celebrations of the Silla kingdom roughly two thousand years ago, when communities marked the closing of the agricultural year with communal thanksgiving rites. The festival was formalized as a fixed calendar observance during the Goryeo dynasty, becoming an occasion for people to return to their home villages in a pattern later dynasties and the modern state have both preserved, and the Confucian family values that shaped the Joseon dynasty sharpened its focus specifically onto ancestral memorial ritual rather than harvest celebration alone.
Roger Janelli and Dawnhee Yim Janelli's ethnographic study of ancestor worship in Korean society situates charye, the food and wine offering made before ancestral tablets, as inseparable from the wider Korean kinship and lineage structures the rite both expresses and helps sustain, performed on Chuseok and the Lunar New Year as the two central occasions of the ritual calendar shared across nearly every Korean household regardless of individual religious affiliation.