🇰🇷 SeollalKorean Lunar New Year · 설날 · Korean New Year

Seollal (설날) is the Korean Lunar New Year, the first day of the lunar calendar and — alongside Chuseok — Korea's most important traditional holiday. Like Chuseok, it is a three-day public holiday cluster covering the eve, the day itself, and the day after. The actual lunar date drifts: it falls in late January in some years and mid-February in others.

The day's anchor rituals are charye (차례, ancestral rites at the family altar) and sebae (세배), the deep New-Year bow that younger family members make to elders in exchange for sebaetdon (세뱃돈) — money handed over in colourful envelopes. The signature dish is tteokguk (떡국), a clear beef-broth soup with sliced rice cakes; eating it is said to add a year to your age, and traditional Korean age was anchored to Seollal until the 2023 legal reform aligning Korea with the international system.

The travel pattern mirrors Chuseok almost exactly. Seoul empties as families return to ancestral hometowns; KTX tickets sell out the moment booking opens; the eve and day-after are the worst driving days of the early year. Substitute holidays (대체공휴일) commonly extend the cluster to four days when one of the three lands on a Sunday, and Seollal is one of the highest-volume outbound-flight windows for Korean travellers.

Culturally, Seollal is the more solemn of the two big lunar holidays — it carries deeper Confucian weight than Chuseok, and the rites are more closely observed even among families that skip charye for Chuseok. Younger urban Koreans increasingly observe a slimmed-down version: a single morning visit, tteokguk for lunch, and an afternoon flight to Da Nang or Sapporo. Department stores remain open, but the traditional gift-set markets — boxed Korean beef, fruit, ginseng — explode in the two weeks beforehand.