Ppaeppaero Day

November 11th is an unofficial holiday for children and couples, as I found out yesterday. It's kind of like Valentine's Day. Apparently, 11/11 reminds them of a bunch of sticks, so not too many years ago, it became popular to give chocolate-covered wafer or pretzel sticks, called Ppaeppaero to friends, relatives, and teachers. (My romanization is based on the standard that I always use, but I've been seeing it online as Pepero.)

The inception of this pseudoholiday is somewhat apocryphal, but the general consensus seems to be that a company called Lotte, which is a major Korean producer of everything imaginable, including chocolate sticks, made up the holiday for capital gain. I did read one story that suggested that some schoolgirls in Busan started the tradition in 1994 because they wanted to grow as tall and slender as the Ppaeppaero, but it seems unlikely that the practice would spread so effectively from that beginning.

So today, my students gave me three boxes of original Lotte Ppaeppaero, one box of chocolate-coffee-latte (or something, I forget 'cause I ate 'em all) Ppaeppaero, and five or six large chocolate pretzel sticks. I don't like the big ones so much, because a chocolate-covered pretzel isn't very good unless it has salt on it. Damn them for not realizing that.


Here are a couple pictures of the Engrish on the pretzel wrappers:

This is a box of the original Ppaeppaero. You can see the name in Hangeul here:

On the Lotte box, it says "Since 1983," so I asked the kids and one of the Korean teachers if that referred to Lotte or to the holiday, and she said it was Lotte, so the holiday is definitely less than 25 years old.

Some of the boxes even have little cards built into the back so you can write messages. Here's a message from Kate:

Here's another message written directly on the bag (which is inside the box):

It's funny, I think I got the bags without the boxes because some of the boxes have the same kind of contests our candies have. Lotte owns cinemas, and if you find a ticket in your box, you can use it for a free movie at Lotte Cinema. So I think they checked before giving me the candy, haha. Wesley told me about that. Such a nice boy.

I was thinking about why this got so popular on the way home tonight, and I decided that Koreans have all these extra fun candy and present days (White Day, Children's Day, etc.), because life sucks so much here, what with 12-15 hours of homework or work six days a week for most people. Kids and young people have these holidays, and adults have binge drinking every night. It seems to work well for them.