Monday, February 25, 2013

Our First Korean Lunar New Year 2013

February has been quite busy for some reason this year. I'm thinking it's all the birthdays, travelling, and  holidays during the month. I wanted to share our first new year celebration with our friends. ON February 9th, we celebrated the lunar New Year - the year of the SNAKE - with our good friends the Kang family.  She invited 3 Korean adoptee families to come and celebrate with them on this special holiday. We were super excited as we never celebrated it before.

When we arrived to their house we had a traditional new year meal - rice soup (for long life and prosperity), noodles, galbi, and traditional rice cakes. It was the best Korean meal we have ever tasted. Then the kids dressed up in the their Korean hanboks to perform the blessing ceremony.  Olivia's teacher at school kindly found a beautiful hanbok for Olivia to wear for this special ceremony. The one she had was too small as she wore it for her TOL (1st birthday). Luckily, William's hanbok still fit.












In this ceremony, the children were asked to kneel and bow in front of their elders.  Then the elders would give them a blessing and "advise" them on certian behaviours or actions they would like to see this year. For example "Olivia you are a big girl now, we would like you to be a better listener".  As we said this, Olivia never maintained eye contact and was too distracted to see what was going on in the back. She didn't hear a word we said. Sigh. Maybe next year. For William - " William...we would like you to be a good boy and be nice to your sister.". His response - "Ya!" with a nod. Sigh...at least he bowed properly. hahahahha

After Olivia and William "paid their respect" to us we gave them some money for good luck (which were loonies that we took from their piggy banks because we didn't have any lying around).  Then Olivia and William were able to go see other adults and continue to ask for blessings (aka ask for loonies). hahahaha  All in all, it was a great experience and the kids had a blast.  Soon the kids were getting hot and tired and wanted to take off their hanboks to play.

Sunah then showed us how to play a traditional Korean game HYE-MI CHO, usually played on New Year's day.




Then things started to slow down. The kids were done and tired. Seeing that it was a Sunday night, we needed to go home and get ready for the week. It was a busy weekend, but made lots of memories and hopefully a new tradition.


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