So I asked our Kitchen Stories team to share their stories from the holiday: How they celebrate the beginning of the new year, and most importantly, what they eat. I grew up in Korea and my family celebrated 설날 (Seollal) every year, but I know there are many more ways to greet the new year in different cultures, even households. Regardless of the animal that stands as the icon, millions of people around the world will celebrate the beginning of the year in colorful and sumptuous fashion: multiple days (sometimes weeks) are marked off as holidays, supermarkets advertise special ingredients and deals, streets are filled with food vendors and decorated with festive signs and flags… The festivities take place especially prominently across mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Korea, but they also extend globally to wherever their cultural diasporas have settled, and welcome whoever chooses to partake (with full, steaming plates of food)! And that includes us at Kitchen Stories. According to the Chinese zodiac consisting of 12 animals, it will be the year of the rabbit, while if you follow the Vietnamese zodiac, it will be the year of the cat. In 2023, the first day of the lunar new year falls on January 22nd in the Gregorian calendar. There were even superstitions associated with the agriculture for the new year in which one would pull up a barley root and if there were more than three strands would signify a bountiful harvest, two would mean an average one, and one root strand would mean a poor harvest.Food Editor at Kitchen Stories Welcome to the Year of the Rabbit! Other superstitions included good or bad fortune for the new year said to be determined by whether one would hear a magpie in the morning (good) or a crow (bad). There were even restrictions on women visiting another household as it was said it would bring bad luck to the visited household. For example, in the past it was considered unlucky for grains to leave a household on new year's day as it would mean the household's wealth would also leave the house in the new year. Many of them had to do with the first day of the lunar new year. Though not quite relevant in today's age, Lunar New Year in the past for Koreans came with quite a lot of superstitions attached to it. ![]() Other families also add homemade mandu (dumplings) to make it into more heartier dishes like manduguk or tteokmanduguk. Though all families will eat tteokguk, there are different variations of the dish including an oyster broth-based tteokguk in certain coastal regions and different shaped rice cakes such as the mini snowman-like joraengi tteok used typically in tteokguk of the Gaesong region. ![]() The whiteness of the rice and soup is also said to reflect a pure body, mind, and heart as one enters the new year. ![]() Eating tteokguk is not only thought to usher in good luck for the new year but on a significant level it reflects gaining a year older under Korean age when everyone turns a year older on New Year's Day. This hot soup dish is made with a protein-based broth (most commonly beef) in which seasonings and sliced plain, oval-shaped rice cakes are cooked and then topped with chopped scallions, cooked meat, toasted laver, cooked egg. While some of the main dishes prepared can vary by family and the region they are from, one dish that is ubiquitous across all Korean families is tteokguk (or rice cake soup).
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