Doing the Ham-Ceremony

Me with a squid on my face in the infamous parka,
freaking out Young, who got married the next day.

I guess it's time to tell about the ham-ceremony I took part in last month, in preparation for Young's wedding the following day, and the evening before my trip to Japan. No, the ham-ceremony has nothing to do with pork...squid instead.

The following is a section from my monthly update letter, which I share with my Global Family.

“Ham” literally means box or chest. It is customary for the bridegroom to give to the bride’s family a ham, which is a coffer with (I’m assuming traditional) clothes. The coffer is taken to the bride’s parent’s house by the ham-bearers, whom are the groom’s closest friends (i.e. the best men). But it’s slightly more complicated than that. Part of the ham-ceremony is to get the bride’s family to “buy” the gift and it involves shouting in the street with a squid on your face. So this is how it works, or at least, this was my experience:

We were two in the convoy, me being the actual “ham”-bearer. For this I had to wear a mask with a dried squid. Nobody seems to know why. It’s traditional. (That’s the answer for anything you don’t know the reason for.) I don’t know how they made the mask in olden times, but what we did was to buy a paper mask and then we cut out “eyes” from the dried squid and stapled the thing onto the mask. The mask has two distinct disadvantages; it doesn’t smell too great and it looks rather scary, as the photos can testify.

Donned with the squid on my face and carrying the wrapped coffer we started out about 30 meters outside of Angelina’s house. I would loudly shout “Ham saseyo!” and my accomplice would echo. “Saseyo” literally means “buy please”. So, “Ham saseyo!” can be translated as “Ham for sale”, or “Please buy this Ham”. Family members of Angelina came out with envelopes that contained money. These were put a couple of steps in front of me, enticing me to walk forward. If I stepped on the money it was a sign that we accepted the “bribe” to come closer. Unfortunately with the squid on my face and the coffer in my arms I couldn’t readily make out where I was stepping, so I often had to tread around haphazardly in one vicinity until I happened to step on the envelope. Also, I wasn’t too sure when to call “ham saseyo” and when to continue forward. The quicker one enters the house, the less money you are “bribed” with, so the key is to find that nice balance between getting enough “gifts”, whatever that may be, and not harassing the family and probably offending them by taking too long to enter the house. Luckily, Young was close by. He had to be to show us where the house is. So he prodded and poked me from behind, suggesting when to shout and when to walk.

Once in the house the ham should be presented to the bride-to-be’s parents. Waiting was Angelina’s mom (her dad passed away a couple of months before). I presented the coffer and then had to do the formal Korean bow. This was unexpected. I’ve never done the deep bow before, and have only seen it performed a couple of times. I tried my best, but think I messed it up a bit. Luckily everyone was very gracious and my foreigner-ignorance was kindly endured.

The whole event finished off with us all enjoying a lovely meal together. Both Angelina and her mother were dressed in beautiful hanbok. A hanbok is the traditional dress of Korea. The affair also seemed to include ddeok (traditional Korean rice cake) prepared by the bride-to-be’s family. I’m not quite sure how the ddeok fits into the whole thing though. A large amount of ddeok was sent with Young as a gift to his parents.

The photo in this post is not a Creative Commons image.