By Seijin Yu
In Caitlin Chung’s earliest memories of Seollal, or Korean Lunar New Year, there was no dinner table in sight. Only the familiar hum of a small, crowded room with red carpet floors, leather couches and the cross-legged chatter of her nine cousins perched on the ground.
“My grandparents owned a fruit store called Ko Fruit Market in Roncesvalles and they lived right above it,” said Chung, a second-year journalism student at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) and an events associate for the Korean Student Association (KSA). “We’d sit on the floor and make mandu, and somehow ended up sitting on the floor again when they moved into a condo.”
“We’d sit on the floor and make mandu, and somehow ended up sitting on the floor again when they moved into a condo.”
Mandu—plump, hand-folded dumplings, which her family stuffed with kimchi, pork, ginger and scallions—always found its way to their table on Lunar New Year. Korean-Canadians are often improvisational and personalized in their approach to such traditions as witnessed through Chung.
Her grandmother, who honed her recipe for decades, led the kitchen with what Chung called her unparalleled sonmat, or hand-taste. “There’s some sort of LSD in her hands,” she joked. “My mouth is watering just talking about it.”
As her grandmother aged, her mother inherited the role of kitchen matriarch. Year after year, the women in Chung’s family gather to knead dough, shape dumplings and prepare jeon—savoury fried pancakes—a process as loud and energetic as it was intimate.
An evolution of tradition
In Korea, Seollal, which falls on Jan. 29, marks the first day of the lunisolar calendar. Used by many cultures, it combines the solar year with lunar months, which is why the holiday falls on a different date each year. It aligns with the moon’s cycles rather than the Gregorian grid. It was once stretched into a weeks-long celebration, ending with Daeboreum, or the first full moon of the year according to the Academy of Korean Studies. It is now a three-day-long celebration and one of the nation’s most significant holidays—a time when everything from harvests to households revolved around its traditions.
Now, widely practiced customs like charye—an ancestral memorial service performed during Seollal—have become a relic in contemporary families. Shared meals like tteokguk — rice cake soup which symbolizes aging a year — and games like yutnori have taken centre stage. Even practices like seba — a symbolic bow to elders wishing a year of good health — have modernized, and are no longer expected to be performed following charye, making the rituals increasingly optional.
Korean-Canadians like Chung’s family—balancing diasporic identities and changing cultural norms—have largely shifted their focus toward communal food preparation.“We just do it because we did it growing up,” Chung’s mother, Lily Ko, said about her Lunar New Year routine.
Food as a bridge
Food preparation during Seollal is a chaotic labour of love. Chung recounted the laughter amongst cousins, clumsily folding dumplings as kids, panicking over poorly stuffed or asymmetrical shapes. She shared a common, light-hearted superstition about “How your mandu had to look nice because it means you’ll have beautiful babies.”
Jacey Lee, a first-year business technology management student and internal associate of the KSA, called dumpling-making sessions a “core family memory.” Raised in a multigenerational home in Newmarket, Ont., Lee also reflected on times mixing batter for jeon alongside her grandparents.
“It’s good to have something that’s foundational in some way,”
While she and many others don’t know the holiday’s exact origins, that’s not what seems to matter anymore. “It’s good to have something that’s foundational in some way,” said Ko. “I hope this tradition will pass down to my kids.”
Family customs
Other TMU students echoed these sentiments. For Michelle Park, a first-year retail management student, the scent of songpyeon—a traditional Korean rice cake— fills her home with remnants of the new year. Despite the preparation of Korean cuisine being primarily led by maternal figures, Park said that this tradition was all hands-on.
Surrounded by her immediate family, Park recalled these traditions since she was five years old as a key childhood memory. With over 13 people in the house, she says that everybody would gather in the kitchen infused in the aroma of the steamed songpyeon.
Amidst the clatter of family members collectively preparing for the holiday, the younger children would mess around with the clay-like dough, later transforming it into a sticky, savoury dish. “Once it steams, you can smell the sugar melting and how the sesame seeds infuse with the sugar. I would say it is a very nostalgic scent for a lot of Koreans,” Park said.
Like Park’s family, the emphasis on customization reflects how Seollal practices, while rooted in tradition, are rarely identical from one family to the next—each brings its own twist to class recipes and procedures.
The art of preservation
Korean-Canadians at TMU are proving that tradition is more than rituals passed through generations. The memories created—folded, kneaded and imperfect—while adapting those traditions to a new context.
Park’s cousins competitively fold songpyeon, where Lee would mix batter with her younger brothers and Chung would tease her cousins about their ugly mandu.
Whether kneeling for sebae or devouring tteokguk, they are not just preserving Seollal. They are reinventing it through cuisine—making sure the table is set for another generation.
Seollal is far from static.
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