Lunar New Year's Day is a traditional folk holiday of Korea.
From olden times, the Korean people set January 1 by the lunar calendar as the Lunar New Year's Day and celebrated it as a big folk holiday of the year.
This year, the Lunar New Year's Day falls on January 29 by the solar calendar.
Doctor Jo Myong Chol, Researcher of the Folklore Institute under the Academy of Social Sciences, said the custom of celebrating the Lunar New Year's Day was encouraged from the period of Ancient Joson, the first ancient state of Korea, and later, it has been traditionally carried forward for a long historical time, and continued:
"'Sol' in Korean means the first day of the year. On the day, people see the old year out and the new year in. It was called the day when they grew a year older.
So our people used to greet the Lunar New Year's Day with new mood and expectation."
The Korean people put great efforts into the preparations for celebrating the Lunar New Year's Day and held various events and played different folk games on the day.
Just before the Lunar New Year's Day they prepared new clothes and cleaned the inside and outside of their houses.
On the eve of the Lunar New Year's Day they cooked festive foods throughout the night.
Events of celebrating the Lunar New Year's Day started on the early morning of the day.
Early in the morning, they first made a bow to their deceased ancestors.
The New Year's bow was made to elders of the family according to seniority and then to elders in villages, relatives and teachers. This custom came into being as the Korean people respected the elders and valued etiquette.
What is also important in the custom of celebrating the Lunar New Year's Day was to prepare festive foods.
Rice cake is the first to be counted on fingers. There were two kinds of rice cake--glutinous rice cake and steamed rice cake.
The festive foods also included pancake, dumpling soup and rice-cake soup. The rice-cake soup, in particular, was considered not to be missed on the Lunar New Year's Day.
Various folk games were played on the Lunar New Year's Day. Typical of them were yut-game, seesaw, kite-flying, sleighing and toy pinwheel. Yut-game was most popular.
Today, the Korean people's traditional custom of celebrating the Lunar New Year's Day has been carried forward and further developed.
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