🧧Seollal (Korean Lunar New Year)

About Seollal (Korean Lunar New Year)

Seollal is the Korean Lunar New Year and one of the country's two biggest holidays alongside Chuseok. Falling on the first day of the lunar calendar, it opens a three-day national holiday when millions of Koreans travel home in one of the year's great migrations. Families reunite to honour their ancestors, share traditional food and wish one another a prosperous year. The countdown above tracks the next Seollal to the second in your own timezone.

The morning begins with charye, a memorial rite of carefully arranged food offered to ancestors, followed by sebae — younger family members make a deep formal bow to their elders and receive words of wisdom and sebaetdon (lucky money). Everyone eats tteokguk, a sliced rice-cake soup; finishing a bowl is said to add a year to your age in the traditional Korean reckoning. Many wear the colourful hanbok and play folk games such as yutnori.

Because Seollal follows the lunisolar calendar, it lands on the second new moon after the winter solstice — usually between late January and mid-February — so the Gregorian date shifts each year. It often coincides with Chinese New Year and Vietnamese Tết. Add this Seollal countdown to your own page to watch the days tick down to Korea's most important family holiday.