Harvest Festivals

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Harvest Festivals

Celebrations and Thanksgiving Ceremonies for successful harvests are given all over the world and have been since ancient times.

In this country we have been giving thanks for successful harvest sine Pagan times. These can be traced to the Roman Empire in 400ad.

Harvest Festivals today in this country are mostly associated with churches, which is probably why it is not such a well celebrated festival. The established churches in this country are rapidly diminishing.

Many schools still celebrate harvest festivals and you will know if your children’s school are doing so, as your children will very likely bring home a letter in their schoolbags asking them to bring in some cans of food, or fresh fruit or flowers for their harvest festival service / assembly

They will have a thanksgiving service and their school hall may be decorated for the occasion.   After the service, the food flowers etc. brought in will be given out to local elderly and poor people.

I remember my primary teacher taking our class to give out some of the fruit and cans to elderly people living in the vicinity of the school. One elderly lady refused to let us leave until she had given every one of us a sweetie or biscuit in return. Our teacher kept insisting she didn’t need to do this. It was quite entertaining for us to watch this ‘battle of wills’ between these two old women. (They were both old in our eyes at the time). It was the one and only ‘battle of wills’ we ever saw our teacher, Miss Japp, lose !

The churches will have the same process except a number of churches are decorated beautifully for this event. Harvest sheaves of corn are used to very good effect in their decorations.

There is no fixed date for the Harvest Festival now, but it should be around September 23^rd.  This will be around the time when we can see the Harvest Moon in the night sky. Its proper name is the -  Autumnal Equinox.

In the USA and Canada it is a national holiday. Here it is not.

Harvest Festival in Ancient Times

Saxon farmers would make a sacrifice of a hare and there was a custom of making Corn Dollies from the last sheaf of corn.

People believed the corn goddess lived in the corn and if ALL the corn was harvested the corn goddess would die, so the corn dolly would be kept till the following spring to ensure a good harvest.

This practise stopped in the 1800s when mechanisation came in to farming.

Harvest Festival in Medieval Times

The Harvest Season used to begin on 1st August and this period was called Lammas - meaning Loaf Mass because bread was given to the local churches which would have been used for communion as well as feeding the clergy.

This custom ended when Henry 8th broke away from the Catholic Church.

Harvest Festivals then moved to September 29th which is Michaelmas Day.

This day was denoted by the ringing of bells – exercising a curfew – and the last horse-cart to come back from the fields  was decorated with garlands.

Goose Day is still celebrated in Nottingham which stems from this festival and the focus on geese is that a goose was a celebration family dinner at this time. We didn’t get turkeys in this country till 1526.

Quarter Day or the Mop (or hirling) Fair are carnival like celebrations which came around at this time. The Mop or Hirling Fair was an opportunity for farm labourers to put themselves up for hire, and this was run like an auction.

As the last of the crops were being gathered in, there was a ceremony called “calling the Mare”. There was a pride in a farm being the first to gather in all their corn, and there was a disgrace in being the last in the area to do likewise.

When the harvesters of a farm had finished their harvesting, they would make a mare out of the corn and throw that to labourers in another farm who still hadn’t finished their harvesting. That Mare got tossed about from farm to farm until the last farm that would have been the slowest to finish harvesting got it. The farmer of that field had to keep the mare until the following year as a mark of shame.

Harvest Festivals 1843 to Present

The tradition we know today of celebrating Harvest Festivals in Churches began in 1843. Reverend Robert Hawker invited Parishioners to a special thanksgiving service at his church in Morwenstow in Cornwall. His parishioners mostly worked on farms and he knew this would mean a lot to them. He would also have felt that it was wrong for the celebration of the harvest to be considered a pagan festival.

From then on, churches have been decorated for harvest festivals - they thank God for the harvest and all His provisions. Children present food, cans flowers etc. and the food etc. gets distributed to elderly and poor people.

by Uddingston ESOL Group

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