Charye represents Chuseok's most explicitly religious dimension: families set a ritual table before ancestral tablets or photographs, offer newly harvested rice, songpyeon, fruit and rice wine, and perform formal bows understood as welcoming deceased ancestors back to share in the family's prosperity for the year, a practice that predates and sits alongside whatever formal religious affiliation, Buddhist, Christian or unaffiliated, individual family members hold. Janelli and Yim Janelli's fieldwork documents how ancestor rites function simultaneously as religious observance and as the primary occasion binding an extended patrilineal kinship group together across generations and, increasingly, across the physical distance of a modernized, urbanized Korea.
Seongmyo, the visit to and tending of ancestral graves, typically ahead of the holiday itself, complements charye's indoor ritual with an outdoor counterpart: families clear overgrown grass, make repairs, and often perform a simpler offering directly at the gravesite, a practice that has remained widespread even as cremation has increasingly replaced burial in contemporary Korean funerary custom.
Chuseok today functions as both a deeply traditional religious observance and a major secular family holiday, and the tension between the two, extensive kitchen labor traditionally falling on women preparing the ritual meal, long queues of holiday travel, competing modern leisure expectations, has itself become a subject of ongoing public discussion in South Korea about how a rite rooted in ancient agrarian and Confucian family structure should adapt to a very different contemporary society.