Before Chuseok in Korea: The In-Laws, the Daughter-in-Law and That "Charye" Table
A friend working in Seoul sent me a photo last night: a heap of dishes spread out on the kitchen floor, her mother-in-law crouching beside them counting them one by one and muttering in Korean, of which she could make out two words — "east" and "west."
In two days it will be Chuseok (추석) in Korea. Chuseok day itself in 2026 falls on 25 September (Friday, the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month), and the statutory holiday runs from 24 to 26 September; as of filing the government had issued no notice on whether Monday 28 September would be taken as a substitute day off.
Over these two days, among the terms Koreans have searched most, "시부모 (parents-in-law)", "시어머니 (mother-in-law)" and "며느리 (daughter-in-law)" turn up together. The holiday has not arrived yet; the pressure has.
What That "Charye" Table Is Actually Laying Out
On the morning of Chuseok, Korean families perform a rite before the offering table called 차례 (charye). Laying that table has a widely circulated set of rules, four lines long:
| Rule | Literal | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 어동육서 (eo-dong-yuk-seo) | fish east, meat west | Fish on the east side of the table, meat on the west |
| 조율이시 (jo-yul-i-si) | jujube, chestnut, pear, persimmon | Jujubes, chestnuts, pears and persimmons, laid out in that order |
| 홍동백서 (hong-dong-baek-seo) | red east, white west | Red foods to the east, white foods to the west |
| 좌포우혜 (jwa-po-u-hye) | jerky left, vinegar right | Meat jerky on the left, vinegar (sikhye, a rice-brewed drink) on the right |
(The bracketed items are romanisations of the Sino-Korean names; the names themselves are written in Hangul in the table above.)
The problem is provenance. Korea's YTN ran a fact-check in 2019 and the conclusion was blunt: sayings such as "red east, white west" and "fish east, meat west" have no clear record in the various ritual manuals and old documents. On 22 September 2026 the Korean weekly Jugan Kyunghyang published another article on when the charye table arrangement was actually codified — which is to say, what is treated today as "the rules handed down from our ancestors" was in fact written down rather late.
None of that stops it from being a real thing: the person laying the table is laying it, and the person asking for it is asking. The rules grew up afterwards, but the conversation in that kitchen is happening right now.
There Is One More Thing on the Table That Cannot Be Escaped
The 송편 (songpyeon) that must be eaten at Chuseok is a half-moon-shaped rice cake; the "song" in the name comes from the pine tree, because a layer of pine needles is spread over the bottom of the steamer. As for why it is half-moon shaped, the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture records only the method and the varieties (divided by filling into red bean, sesame, jujube, pine nut and others, with some made with mugwort or pine bark); it gives no origin for the shape.
The story about the shape has a separate source: Korean media have retold many times over the years that passage in the Samguk Sagi about Silla and Baekje — the full moon was read as abundance about to wane, the half moon as something on the rise again, and so the people of Silla made half-moon cakes to pray for the fortune of the state. Take it as a story; as for the half-moon cake, it is still being made today, and that holds whether or not the story does.
Setting the Furniture and Setting the Offering Table Are the Same Thing
When Korean families explain rules of this kind, the words they use are very close to ours: direction, order, who stands where. This vocabulary is really spatial language — which also explains why reading Residential Feng Shui: Orientation, Circulation and Layout Checks brings a Chuseok kitchen to mind: both are answering the same question, "where is this supposed to go." Things like "which day to hold it, at what hour," on the other hand, are closer to the grammar of time set out in Huangli Date Selection: Where the Suitable and Avoid Lines Come From.
I sent those four lines back to my friend, and she replied: "No wonder I can never remember them — they were made up later."
If the order of a holiday is making you tense as well, on 占卜迷指 it works like this: you describe your trouble in natural language, the system recommends a suitable method, casts the chart and gives a reading, and you can export it to keep and compare against slowly.
Information current as of 23 September 2026 (China Standard Time).
Sources
- YTN fact-check (2019-09-16): where do the ancestral-table rules such as "red east, white west" and "fish east, meat west" come from?
- Jugan Kyunghyang (2026-09-22): when and how the "charye table arrangement" was codified
- Encyclopedia of Korean Culture: 송편 (songpyeon)
- SBS (2022-09-11): why half-moon songpyeon are eaten at the full-moon festival (the story of Silla and Baekje)
- 위키트리 (2026-09-22): the 2026 Chuseok holiday and the debate over a temporary day off on 28 September
- Google Trends data (South Korea, 22–23 September 2026, 24-hour and 168-hour windows; platform-level estimates, not precise search volumes)
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