In less than a week, millions of Koreans will be celebrating Chuseok, a mid-Autumn harvest festival that’s one of the biggest holidays of the year. They will travel from all over to visit their ancestral hometowns, where they’ll spend time with their families, honor their ancestors and share a big feast.

Since my family didn’t observe this wonderful holiday when I was growing up in Hawaii, I knew very little about it until I read Giving Thanks with Halmoni: Celebrating Chuseok, the Korean Harvest Festival by Kathleen Choi and Sook Nyul Choi, illustrated by Il Sung Na (Red Comet Press, 2025).

Children’s books about Chuseok are actually few and far between, so this delectable title is a very welcome offering. Love that it was written by the same mother-daughter team who collaborated on one of my favorite Korean American picture books, Halmoni and the Picnic (1993). I still remember how excited I was when first reading it 32 years ago (back then, picture books by and about Korean Americans were almost non-existent). How wonderful that all these years later, the Choi family is bringing us yet another heartwarming intergenerational tale. 🙂

The halmoni (grandmother) in this new story has recently moved to America. She describes Chuseok (which coincides with the big, bright Harvest Moon), to her granddaughter Su-Jin and her friends Maddy and Keisha, who notes that it sounds a lot like Thanksgiving. Later, when Su-Jin tells her friends that Halmoni likely misses hosting Chuseok dinner with her family and friends in Korea, the girls decide to ask Halmoni to help them throw a Chuseok party for all their friends.

Halmoni is only too happy to oblige, while the girls are excited to pitch in with all the preparations. As the moon grows smaller and smaller, Halmoni first shows the girls how to wrap special Chuseok presents with a pretty cloth called bojagi.

When the moon finally disappears, it’s time to begin serious preparations. The next night, a tiny sliver of the moon appears; while it grows each night after that, Halmoni and the girls shop for ingredients and make several traditional dishes such as Korean scallion pancakes (pajun), japchae noodles, a traditional beef stew called galbijjim, and three-color vegetables.

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