Happy Chuseok: A Thank You to the Rare Disease Community

This Friday, September 25, is Chuseok — one of Korea’s biggest holidays of the year.

If you’ve worked with our team, you may have noticed our offices go quiet for a few days around this time each autumn. Here’s what’s happening — and why we wanted to mark the occasion with you.

What is Chuseok?

Chuseok is an autumn harvest festival, celebrated on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month — which means it falls on a different date each year, always on a full moon.

It’s often described as Korean Thanksgiving, and that’s close enough. Families travel to their hometowns, sometimes across the entire country at once. They share food, visit the graves of their ancestors, and hold a memorial table called charye to give thanks for the year’s harvest. In the evening, people look up at the full moon and make a wish.

The food most associated with the holiday is songpyeon — small half-moon rice cakes, filled with sesame and honey or sweet bean paste, steamed over a layer of pine needles that give them their scent.

Chuseok is also called Hangawi. The name comes from old Korean: han meaning great, and gawi meaning the middle — the great middle of autumn, when the harvest is in and the moon is at its fullest.

How to say happy Chuseok

The most common greeting is:

풍성한 한가위 되세요
pung-seong-han han-ga-wi dwae-se-yo

It translates roughly as “may your Hangawi be abundant” — a wish for a full harvest, and for enough of everything that matters.

A shorter version, if you’d like to try it: 행복한 추석 보내세요 (haeng-bok-han chu-seok bo-nae-se-yo) — “have a happy Chuseok.”

Why we’re saying this to you

At its heart, Chuseok is a holiday about gratitude for a year’s work, and about people coming together.

Rare disease is a field where both of those things matter more than usual. Answers take time. Families wait, often for years, and keep asking questions while they wait. Clinicians take on cases that have already been through many hands. Researchers, advocacy groups, and patient organizations keep the conversation going when it would be easier not to.

None of that is quick, and none of it happens alone.

So this year, we simply wanted to say thank you — to the clinicians who trust us with difficult cases, to the patients and families who share their stories, and to everyone working to make rare disease less isolating than it was a year ago.

풍성한 한가위 되세요. Wishing you an abundant harvest, wherever you are.

— The 3billion team 🌕

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Holiday schedule

Our office will be closed from September 24 to September 27 (KST) in observance of the Chuseok holiday.

During this period, we will not be able to accept any samples, so please avoid sending samples that would arrive during the closure.

We will resume normal operations on Monday, September 28.

For any inquiries, please contact us at support@3billion.io. We’ll respond as soon as we’re back.

— 3billion Support Team