Happy Chuseok and Celebrating Adoption

추석
[From Wikipedia... not the be all, end all source, but it works.]
Chuseok is a major harvest festival and a three-day holiday in Korea which is celebrated on the 15th day of the 8th month of the lunar calendar. Like many other harvest festivals it is held around the Autumn Equinox. As a celebration of the good harvest, Koreans share a feast of Korean traditional food, as well as return to their ancestral hometowns to pay respects to the spirits of one's ancestors.

Typically, people perform ancestral worship rituals early in the morning. They often visit the tombs of their immediate ancestors to trim plants and clean the area around the tomb, and offer food, drink, and crops to their ancestors. Harvest crops are attributed to the blessing of ancestors.

One of the major foods prepared and eaten during the Chuseok holiday is songpyeon, a crescent-shaped rice cake which is steamed on pine needles. Other dishes commonly prepared are japchae, bulgogi and fruits.


Throughout today, I will probably be doing a lot of reflecting to honor this traditional Korean holiday. Mostly about J's Birth Mother, but also about the rest of my family and how thankful I am for each and everyone of them. Each person that has touched our lives in even some little way on the path to forming our family is special. This goes from the social workers and adoption agencies in my childhood that helped to welcome my brother and sister to our family, to the pastor who officiated at C and I's wedding, to the doctors and staff in the infertility clinic, to our current adoption agency's staff and social workers both here in Colorado and in Korea. Mostly though, I am so thankful for the miracle and compassion of a woman in Korea who made a decision to make an adoption plan for the baby she had just birthed into this world. I can not know what she was thinking or feeling at that time, or now, 20 months later, but I can only hope that God's peace and loving was with her then and now. Also, I give thanks for the two women who were foster mothers to our baby and gave him love and nurturing for most of the first 9 months of his life. It is just amazing to me how so many life threads lead to and intertwine with our little family circle to form a web of interconnected grace.

Ok, done contemplating... Other plans for the day are a picnic and then our Celebrating Adoption photo shoot. How appropriate to commemorate our adoption of a baby born in Korea on a traditional Korean holiday! We are going to be working with Kathryn from Sweet Feet Photography. So very excited about it, I finally got our outfits together last night, though this morning I'm wavering again. Hopefully they work well with the fall colors because we will be outside at a park. :) If you are my friend on Facebook, Kathryn will be tagging us whenever she posts the pictures. Plus, I also think there will be an online gallery for those not on Facebook to go browse (if I know you).
Fun stuff. Hopefully, I don't crash and burn later in the day due to lack of sleep (a restless night for J and then kitty/mouse races at 5 a.m. this morning- the mouse lost).