Chuseok Table Setup, Gift Money and Portions in One App
Every September the same four searches come back, and every year the results are worse. Chuseok table setup: a wall of text, no diagram, half of it arguing about regional variations. Gift money for a nephew: forum threads from six years ago. Songpyeon quantities: nothing useful. And a greeting for my in-laws that does not sound like a bank's marketing email. Most of the good material is in Korean, scattered across a dozen pages, and the countryside house where I need it has no signal.
Chuseok Helper folds those four searches into one app that works with no connection at all. It is a holiday guide, not a lifestyle brand: four tabs, no account, and it stays out of the way.
▶ Get it on Google Play (free): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thefacegood.chuseok
Chuseok table setup: the five rows, drawn
The ancestral rite table (charye) is arranged in five rows from the ancestors' side toward where you bow, and the reason people struggle with how to set a charye table is that almost nobody draws it. So the app does. Row one holds rice, soup, songpyeon and the wine cup. Row two is the grilled and pan-fried dishes. Row three is the stews. Row four is dried fish, seasoned vegetables, kimchi and sikhye. Row five is fruit. Tap any dish and you get where it goes and why.
The five classical placement rules are there in one line each: red fruit east and white fruit west, fruit in the order jujube, chestnut, pear, persimmon, fish east and meat west, fish head to the east, dried fish left and sikhye right. There is also a short list of foods traditionally kept off the table (peaches, fish whose Korean name ends in -chi, strong red seasonings, red beans) with the customary reasons.
If your family keeps things simple, a toggle switches to the simplified layout that the Sungkyunkwan ritual committee published in 2022: songpyeon, vegetables, kimchi, fruit and wine, and no obligation to fry a mountain of jeon. The app says plainly that regions and families differ and that your own family's custom wins. I mean that; it is a reference, not a rulebook.
Allowance guide: how much money to give, by relationship
This is the tab that gets opened most, because how much money to give for Chuseok is the question nobody wants to ask out loud. Choose the relationship (nephew or niece, your own child, an adult sibling, parents, grandparents) and an age band, and the app shows the range that is customary. Roughly: small children around ten to thirty thousand won, upper elementary thirty to fifty, high school fifty to a hundred, university students a hundred to two hundred, and parents most commonly somewhere between two hundred and five hundred thousand won.
Pick several people and it totals the cash so you know how many envelopes to prepare and with what inside. There is a short note on envelope etiquette too, because writing the wrong thing on the front is a surprisingly easy mistake.
Food portions and the greetings tab
Enter how many adults and children are coming and the food portions tab estimates what you need: songpyeon, assorted jeon, braised short ribs, japchae, three-colour vegetables, fish, water kimchi and sikhye. The baseline is about ten songpyeon, six pieces of jeon and 250 grams of ribs per person, scaled up or down. If you have wondered how many songpyeon per person to buy, that is the answer built in. The result turns into a shopping list you can share to the family chat so someone else does the carrying.
The greetings tab gives you ready-made lines sorted by who you are addressing: elders, friends, coworkers or a group chat. Copy one and send it, or turn it into a full-moon card image. It is the least ambitious feature and the one my relatives use most.
Who this is for
- First-timers preparing the memorial table, above all someone newly married into a Korean family
- Foreigners living in Korea who want to show up to Chuseok prepared rather than guessing
- The person in the family who has been quietly assigned the shopping
- Anyone who needs a decent greeting in the next thirty seconds
Everything is on the device: no server, no login, no data collection, and the only network use is to show ads. It is free, and I plan to extend the same data to Seollal.
Download (Google Play, free): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thefacegood.chuseok
※ Table layouts, allowance ranges and portions are general customs and vary by region and family. Follow your own family first. The app gives no medical, health or legal advice.
If your family does something differently and you think it belongs in the app, tell me. Several of the notes on regional variation came from exactly those messages.
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