Over the river and through the woods,
To grandmother's house we go;
The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh,
Through (the) white and drifted snow!
Over the river and through the woods,
Oh, how the wind does blow!
It stings the toes and bites the nose,
As over the ground we go.
Over the river and through the woods,
To have a first-rate play;
Oh, hear the bells ring, "Ting-a-ling-ling!"
Hurrah for Thanksgiving Day!
Over the river and through the woods,
Trot fast, my dapple gray!
Spring over the ground,
Like a hunting hound!
For this is Thanksgiving Day.
Over the river and through the woods,
And straight through the barnyard gate.
We seem to go extremely slow
It is so hard to wait!
Over the river and through the woods,
Now Grandmother's cap I spy!
Hurrah for the fun! Is the pudding done?
Hurrah for the pumpkin pie!
Well, it's not Thanksgiving and there is no snow and no pumpkin pie, but we went to visit Grandmother's house for the weekend.
Going down the escalator my wife asked my son if we forgot anything. He started to look a little worried and then he got into the train. There was no time for us to go back home anyway.
He started looking out the window towards the bullet train and thinking.
Then it hit him. He left his Teddy Bear at home. Maybe this seems like a little thing to you but this is not a good sign. Half of the time he still thinks his Teddy Bear is real. Any way his Teddy Bear is the only companion when things got tough between him and his older brother. Staring out the train window he is wishing for two things. First, that he would have remembered to bring his Teddy Bear and second that he would be riding the bullet train instead of the local train. The train we were on was a four car train with only one working bathroom. The KTX train was a bullet train with modern facilities and he knew it.
Grandfather's craft is painting calligraphy and memorizing Confucius teachings.
The environment is very different from our American relatives. But my kids have a wild sense of humor especially when the visit their Korean grandparents. The mood there is always pretty strict so they seem even move set on making jokes just to see how far they can push their grandpa. One of their grandfather's favorite sayings from Confucius is
한번 참으면 오래도록 즐겁다.
It literally means, "If you hold it one time you will be forever glad."
Lunar New Year Dinner actually begins in the morning.
We wake up early and bow down to the grandparents to wish them a "happy new year." After that we go to the grandpa's older brother's house where things get even more serious. There they set up the food to dedicate to their deceased ancestors. They offer food and incense and bow down several times. Every year people say, "It's a good thing we have this tradition or we would never meet together." Then they argue about the placement of the food and the side dishes on the table. One brother says his Dad liked the strawberries on the left side. The other brother said that they ancestors always ate the strawberries from the right side. They his son comes out with this book with yellow papers and shows the proper setting of the strawberries. Meanwhile while the men are fighting about whether the chicken head should be placed the table or away from the table all the women in the family are in the kitchen preparing dduk gook.
It is said that you really don't get a year older until you eat this rice cake soup. After eating the rice cake soup they say you ate one year. From the looks of some of our relatives they should have stopped eating rice cakes soup decades ago.
Finally if that wasn't enough the whole family gets in the car and drives to the ancestral village burial grounds.
The ancestors are buried right outside the old village. There they offer some dried fish and soju alcohol and an apple for desert. I guess after watching their children bicker over breakfast the ancestors need at least a few shots of soju.
Our relatives there are just buried into the ground. There is no stone or anything to mark the place where they are buried just a hill. My son said he likes it that way because the other tombs with markers scare him. He said the tomb with no markers just looks like a place to play.
I totally agree with him and try to show him the bright side of Korean Holidays. On the way back home we kept reminding ourselves of Confucius' teaching:
한번 참으면 오래도록 즐겁다.
"If you hold it one time you will be forever glad."
My son started laughing so hard we almost had an emergency. He said, "Dad look at this. I didn't know Confucius was a comedian. How did Confucius know there was only one bathroom on this train?"
