Turns out that today is Pepero day in Korea. Sang Boon bought me a box of pepero to celebrate.

“According to one story, Pepero Day was started in 1994 by students at a girls’ middle school in Busan, where they exchanged Pepero sticks as gifts to wish one another to grow “as tall and slender as a Pepero” (Pepero means “thin like a stick”). However, it is more likely it was initiated by Lotte, the company which produces Pepero.” It is also interesting to note that Pepero is known as pocky in Singapore.

One must commend Lotte’s marketting department. That they managed to create a day in the year that commemorates both Pepero AND puppy love in the 80s and get it to stick around through the thick and thin of changing trends, in fact to become a tradition, is truly an act of genius.

I hope to find out more about the emergence of this trend in time to come and write about it here.