Korea shuts down for three days this week for Chuseok. Does your country have a holiday like this?

This Thursday to Saturday (Sept 24–26) South Korea basically closes. It's Chuseok (추석) — our harvest festival, held on the 15th day of the 8th lunar month, when the moon is supposed to be the biggest and brightest of the year. This year that's Friday the 25th.

I work in marketing in Seoul, and the week before Chuseok is a strange mix: everyone is scrambling to finish things before the break, and the whole city is carrying gift boxes. Spam sets, fruit sets, toothpaste sets (yes, really), Korean beef, dried yellow corvina. The subway smells like pears.

What Chuseok actually looks like for most families:

• The migration. Tens of millions of people drive to their hometowns, so a trip that normally takes 3 hours takes 8. The traffic map on the news is its own genre of entertainment — every year someone spots a car stuck at the same exit as last year.
• Charye (차례). A memorial table for ancestors on the morning of Chuseok: rice, soup, fruit stacked in odd numbers, jeon (savory pancakes), and always the family argument about which side of the table the fish goes on. More families are skipping or simplifying it every year, and there's a running joke about who actually stands over the frying pan for six hours the day before.
• Songpyeon (송편). Half-moon rice cakes with sesame or bean filling, steamed over pine needles. Legend says if you make pretty ones you'll have a pretty baby. Nobody's songpyeon is pretty.
• Beolcho (벌초). In the weeks before, families go out to cut the grass on their ancestors' grave mounds. Trimmers everywhere.
• The moon. After dinner, people go outside to look at the full moon and make a wish. It's genuinely the one part of the holiday nobody complains about.

What surprised me when I started working with people overseas is how many places have the same idea on the same day. The Mid-Autumn Festival in China, Tết Trung Thu in Vietnam (where it's more of a children's lantern festival), and Tsukimi in Japan (moon-viewing with round dango) all land on the same lunar date — so this Friday, a big chunk of East Asia is looking at the same moon and eating something round.

And then there are the harvest festivals that aren't about the moon at all: Thanksgiving in the US and Canada, Erntedankfest in Germany, Sukkot, Pongal in southern India. Different dates, same instinct — the crops are in, gather the family, eat too much, argue about something.

So I'm curious:

1. Does your country have a "go home, see the family, eat the special food" holiday? What's the food?
2. Is there a traffic-jam or airport-chaos tradition around it?
3. Is there a task everyone secretly dreads (our answer is standing at the frying pan)?

Happy Chuseok from Seoul 🌕 — I'll be reading replies from the passenger seat somewhere on the Gyeongbu Expressway.