Hellobee

In a couple of weeks, we will be ringing in the New Year here. Nope, I’m not on the wrong calendar page. Nope, I’m not having a belated holiday party. (Although considering how our January went… that’s not really a bad idea!) I’m referring to the Lunar New Year, which occurs on February 10th this year.

When Mr. Paintbrush and I started our international adoption journey, we felt very strongly that we were adopting a whole culture along with our child. We wanted to keep his Korean heritage as alive as we possibly could for him. We do this in lots of little ways in our everyday lives, but we also try very hard to do this in a couple of big ways. One of which is celebrating the important Korean holidays, including 추석 (Chuseok, aka Mid-Autumn Harvest Festival) and 설날 (Seollal, aka Lunar New Year).

I think most of us fantasize about future holidays with our littles while we are on the path to parenthood, no!? We think about how cute our children will look in Halloween costumes, we imagine their looks of joy at Christmas and Hanukkah, we smile when we think of that first fistful of birthday cake. Now that I’m a parent, these holidays… while they require planning… have become second nature to me.

The Korean holidays are still very much an intentional, and heavily planned, process for me. Let’s be honest. I’m not Korean. I have never celebrated Lunar New Year prior to starting our adoption journey. {Well, there was one year in college where we took our roommate, who was a Chinese exchange student, out drinking… but I don’t think that counts.} Most of the time, I don’t know what I’m really doing. This means that Lunar New Year, Seollal, is very much a learning curve for me. I don’t want to be the token adoptive family at the Korean restaurant. I don’t want to just “skate by,” acknowledging the holiday because I should. I want it to become part of the fabric of our family.

{Ready to go out to eat for Seollal 2010}

This means I have to ask for a lot of help. I ask the women at the Korean market for help, I ask the owner of the Korean restaurant for help, I ask my Korean friends for help, I ask Spencer’s Tae Kwon Do Master for help. It also means that I do my best, and know that each year I will improve on the previous years. I accept my mistakes and flounderings, hoping that they are part of the path to fully incorporating this holiday into our family. And I accept that our celebrations will never be exactly like those held in Korea. But, then we aren’t exactly like those families either… are we?!

{Seollal 2011}

As the years have passed… Seollal has become more meaningful, and a little easier. The first year as a family… it was all I could do to get us to the restaurant, prepared to order the “appropriate” New Year’s food. I focused on where my skill set laid at that point, and made my son a shirt to celebrate the year of the tiger. We dressed him up in the hanbok his foster mother gave him, and took pictures.  It worked. No, it wasn’t the celebration I envisioned, but it was still nice.

The second year, was a repeat of the previous year. But I made my own tteokguk! Tteokguk is rice cake soup, and it’s tradition to have a bowl on New Year’s day as it represents health and prosperity. See… improving already. Last year, I felt like things started to fall into place. I managed a whole Korean meal … tteok-mandu-guk (our take on the tradition), bibimbap, and traditional Korean cookies for dessert. (Ok, I bought the cookies… but the rest I made!) Not only that, Spencer had new clothes for New Year’s day, since our friends were able to buy Spencer a new hanbok while in Korea. (He had outgrown his old one.) Another tradition fulfilled! This Mama also got it together enough to bring in a story to read to Spencer’s class, along with some clementines for snacks… I even managed to create some dragon masks for the kids to color! I was completely exhausted at the end, but I felt like it was a good homage to the holiday.

{New Clothes for New Year’s Day • Seollal 2012}

This year… Well, I’m actually really excited! In previous years, it’s been excitement tempered with a good dose of anxiety and fear of failure. I finally feel like we are finding how our family can celebrate this holiday… a little tradition mixed with a little inspiration. We’ll be bringing a story and snacks to school again. Spencer will wear his hanbok, and we’ll teach his classmates to count to ten in Korean. His Tae Kwon Do Master has been teaching him the formal bow (sae bae) which he will demonstrate for his class. Here at home, we’ll cook a big Korean meal… including tteok-mandu-guk, of course! Spencer will don his hanbok and we’ll take some photos. And I managed to secure some red money envelopes, so maybe we will even convince him to make a video of his sae bae to send to his foster family in Korea. We have lanterns hanging and I’m working on a garland that reads “새해 복 많이 받으세요,” which is the traditional New Year Greeting, meaning “Please receive a lot of good luck in the New Year.”

It’s still a very intentional celebration for me. I still do a lot of web searching. I still ask a lot of silly questions. I’m realizing how hard it is to create tradition, when you have no background or history of your own to go by. But pieces of it have fallen into place. And the joy and pride I see on my son’s face and in his body language makes it all worth it. There is no better reward than to see him smiling as he perfects his sae bae with his Master, to see him eagerly answer questions from his classmates, to see him have seconds (and thirds!) of the soup. Who knows, maybe next year I will feel confident enough to throw a little Seollal Celebration here…

In the meantime,  새해 복 많이 받으세요 everyone!