Ch'usok, the harvest moon festival, is the Korean Thanksgiving. This third great national holiday of the year falls on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, or usually September or October by the solar calendar.

Once again the people dress in their beautiful silk traditional clothes. Women spend hours preparing special foods made from the newly harvested grain. During the day, the mountainsides are dotted with bright colors as villagers visit the ancestral tombs and offer the specially prepared foods at the shrines. Family and friends enjoy fresh fruits, ttok, rice cakes filled with bean curd and sweets, and wine as they dance to the music of native instruments or play games in the fields.

As the brightest of all the full moons appears over the horizon, young people pray for their health and the realization of their dreams.

In Ch'ungch'ong and Kyonggi provinces, in the light of the full moon, the farmers perform the Tortoise Parade. Four men (14-1, p. 20) carrying a mattress of woven straw in the shape of the tortoise shell on their bent shoulders walk slowly through the village. Followed by a band of gongs and drums, they visit each house, shouting, "The tortoise of the Eastern Sea has crossed the waves from far away and come to this village. Give him a good dinner." The villagers fill them with delicious ttok and wine.

We look back in history to South Cholla Province, during the time of Admiral Yi Sun-sin's naval battle in 1592 with the Japanese, for the traditional Kanggang Suwollae, "fierce dogs are coming over the sea" song and dance held under this full moon. As the brave Korean men faced the enemy, crowds of women climbed the hills around the battlefields, set fires, sang, and marched in circles to deceive the Japanese as to the number of troops defending the nation. Today, twenty to thirty young women, wearing traditional costumes and their hair braided down their backs, hold hands to form a circle, and dance and sing Kanggang Suwollde to remember the heroic efforts of their people in time of war.