Salvation Army Red Kettles & Korea's Love Thermometer

Walk through Myeongdong or out of Seoul Station in December and you will hear it before you see it: a small brass bell, rung by someone in a red coat standing next to a red pot on a tripod. A few minutes’ walk from Gwanghwamun Station, a tall tower with a giant thermometer climbs a little higher every few days.

The first is the 자선냄비 (jaseon-naembi, “charity pot”) of the Salvation Army. The second is the 사랑의 온도탑 (Love Thermometer tower) of 사랑의열매 (Sarangui Yeolmae, the Community Chest of Korea). Here is what each one is, what the numbers say about how Koreans give, and how you can join in.

What are the red kettles you see in Seoul every December?

They are the Salvation Army’s street collection, which has run in Korea since December 15, 1928. Volunteers, officers and church members stand beside each kettle and ring a bell, and passers-by drop in cash.

The Salvation Army Korea tells the origin story this way: in 1891 an officer in San Francisco, needing to feed about a thousand poor people at Christmas, hung a large iron pot at the Oakland pier with a sign asking people to keep it boiling. The idea spread. In Korea, where the Salvation Army began work in 1908, the first kettle went up in Seoul in 1928. The organization counted the 2025 campaign as its 97th.

🔔 Salvation Army Korea kettle campaigns (from the organization's own result reports, as of October 2026)

Read the 2025 number with care. The ₩4.7 billion is the total for the kettle period and the report doesn’t separate street coins from corporate gifts. Financial News reported a running total of about ₩2.18 billion on December 22, 2025, up from about ₩1.99 billion at the same point a year earlier.

Payment has changed too. Seoul City’s news site reported credit-card “digital kettles” in 2012, and in 2020 a contactless kettle at Sinchon Station that took transit cards, ZeroPay, Naver Pay and QR codes. For the 2025 season, Newsis reported a new NFC system: hold your phone to the kettle and you can give in about 14 seconds without installing an app.

How does the Love Thermometer at Gwanghwamun work?

The thermometer rises 1 degree every time 1% of the national fundraising target comes in, so 100 degrees means the goal has been met. The Community Chest of Korea sets up these towers in all 17 cities and provinces for its year-end 희망나눔캠페인 (Hope Sharing Campaign), which runs 62 days from December 1 to January 31. The national tower stands in Gwanghwamun Square, where the 2025-26 campaign opened and closed and the 2024-25 campaign held its closing ceremony.

The campaign is older than its name. The Community Chest says the old “help needy neighbors” year-end drive was renamed “Hope 2000” in December 1999, with the next year’s number attached, and settled into the current Hope Sharing Campaign format in December 2007. The 2025-26 tower was modeled on a chimney, a design picked in a public contest, the idea being that warmth from giving spreads out through it.

🌡️ The last two Hope Sharing Campaigns (as reported by Segye Ilbo and Newsis)

The 2025-26 campaign closed at 113.9°, the first time the drive passed ₩500 billion, Newsis reported from the closing ceremony on February 2, 2026. For the full year 2025, the Community Chest raised ₩986.4 billion from 896,283 individual and 42,752 corporate donors.

How many Koreans actually donate?

About one in four. In the 2025 Social Survey by the National Data Office (formerly Statistics Korea), 26.1% of respondents said they had given money in the past year, up from 23.7% in 2023, Kyunghyang Shinmun reported. Herald Business reported the same two figures.

📈 Share who donated in the past year, Social Survey (as reported by Kyunghyang Shinmun, November 12, 2025)

The rate dipped during the pandemic years and has climbed back, though not to the 2015 level. The same survey found 39.6% plan to give in the next year, and the most common reason donors gave was simply that helping others makes them happy (28.7%). Willingness to leave part of an estate to charity fell to 22.2%, the lowest since that question began in 2011.

So the big thermometer numbers come mostly from corporate checks, while the coins in the kettle are the part of the season most people actually touch. If you are curious how money moves at other moments in Korean life, the guide to wedding gift money covers the other famous envelope.

How can a visitor donate to a red kettle or the thermometer?

Drop cash into a red kettle: it needs no account, app or Korean phone number. The other channels work too, but several assume a Korean phone or bank account.

💳 Ways to give, and what each needs (as of October 2026)

Where will you see kettles and the thermometer in Seoul?

Around big stations, department stores and Myeongdong, plus the thermometer tower in Gwanghwamun Square. The kettle map on the Salvation Army site listed 238 spots nationwide, 60 of them in Seoul, when we checked on October 30, 2026. The site warns that whether a kettle is staffed depends on conditions on the day, and 2026 locations had not been announced.

📍 Open in Naver Map — Gwanghwamun Square

📍 Open in Naver Map — Myeongdong Theater

Gwanghwamun Square makes an easy stop on a December evening, with the tower out front and the palace gate behind it. Pair it with the winter illumination routes or a walk along Cheonggyecheon. For the rest of the season, see Seoul Christmas 2026 and the New Year’s Eve bell-ringing at Bosingak, a short walk from the square.

Can you volunteer as a kettle bell-ringer?

The Salvation Army takes kettle volunteers in December only, in shifts of at least two hours. Its FAQ says one person can do up to four shifts (eight hours) a day, kettles are normally staffed in pairs, elementary-school children need an adult with them, and you can apply without signing up as a member.

The application page is in Korean, and the FAQ does not say whether foreign visitors can join, so ask through the site’s 1:1 inquiry form before you plan around it. The organization also runs “Special Kettles”, where people raise money with their own street performance or skill; 24 teams took part in 2025.