Harvest festival

From New World Encyclopedia
Revision as of 23:09, 14 September 2019 by Jennifer Tanabe (talk | contribs) (→‎Asia)
National Harvest Thanksgiving ceremony in in Częstochowa, Poland.

A harvest festival is an annual celebration that occurs around the time of the main harvest of a given region. These festivals typically feature feasting, both family and public, with foods that are drawn from crops that come to maturity around the time of the festival. Ample food and freedom from the necessity to work in the fields are two central features. Eating, merriment, contests, music, and romance are common features of harvest festivals around the world.

History

Lammas loaf Owl with salt eyes

Lammas Day (Anglo-Saxon hlaf-mas, "loaf-mass"), is a holiday celebrated in some English-speaking countries in the Northern Hemisphere on 1 August. It is a festival to mark the annual wheat harvest, and is the first harvest festival of the year. On this day it was customary to bring to church a loaf made from the new crop, which began to be harvested at Lammastide, which falls at the halfway point between the summer Solstice and Autumn September Equinox.

The loaf was blessed, and in Anglo-Saxon England it might be employed afterwards in protective rituals:[1] a book of Anglo-Saxon charms directed that the lammas bread be broken into four bits, which were to be placed at the four corners of the barn, to protect the garnered grain.

In many parts of England, tenants were bound to present freshly harvested wheat to their landlords on or before the first day of August. In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, where it is referred to regularly, it is called "the feast of first fruits". The blessing of first fruits was performed annually in both the Eastern and Western Churches on the first or the sixth of August (the latter being the feast of the Transfiguration of Christ).

Lammas has coincided with the feast of St. Peter in Chains, commemorating St. Peter's miraculous deliverance from prison, but in the liturgical reform of 1969, the feast of St. Alphonsus Liguori was transferred to this day, the day of St. Alphonsus' death.

In medieval times the feast was sometimes known in England and Scotland as the "Gule of August",[2] but the meaning of "gule" is unclear. Ronald Hutton suggests[3] following the 18th-century Welsh clergyman antiquary John Pettingall[4] that it is merely an Anglicisation of Gŵyl Awst, the Welsh name of the "feast of August". The OED and most etymological dictionaries give it a more circuitous origin similar to gullet; from Old French goulet, a diminutive of goule, "throat, neck," from Latin gula "throat".

Several antiquaries beginning with John Brady[5] offered a back-construction to its being originally known as Lamb-mass, under the undocumented supposition that tenants of the Cathedral of York, dedicated to St. Peter ad Vincula, of which this is the feast, would have been required to bring a live lamb to the church,[6] or, with John Skinner, "because Lambs then grew out of season." This is a folk etymology, of which OED notes that it was "subsequently felt as if from LAMB + MASS".

For many villeins, the wheat must have run low in the days before Lammas, and the new harvest began a season of plenty, of hard work and company in the fields, reaping in teams.[7] Thus there was a spirit of celebratory play.

In the medieval agricultural year, Lammas also marked the end of the hay harvest that had begun after Midsummer. At the end of hay-making a sheep would be loosed in the meadow among the mowers, for him to keep who could catch it.[8]

In Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (1.3.19) it is observed of Juliet, "Come Lammas Eve at night shall she [Juliet] be fourteen." Since Juliet was born Lammas eve, she came before the harvest festival, which is significant since her life ended before she could reap what she had sown and enjoy the bounty of the harvest, in this case full consummation and enjoyment of her love with Romeo.

Another well-known cultural reference is the opening of The Battle of Otterburn: "It fell about the Lammas tide when the muir-men win their hay".

William Hone speaks in The Every-Day Book (1838) of a later festive Lammas day sport common among Scottish farmers near Edinburgh. He says that they "build towers...leaving a hole for a flag-pole in the centre so that they may raise their colours." When the flags over the many peat-constructed towers were raised, farmers would go to others' towers and attempt to "level them to the ground." A successful attempt would bring great praise. However, people were allowed to defend their towers, and so everyone was provided with a "tooting-horn" to alert nearby country folk of the impending attack and the battle would turn into a "brawl." According to Hone, more than four people had died at this festival and many more were injured. At the day's end, races were held, with prizes given to the townspeople.

Customs and traditions

An early harvest festival used to be celebrated at the beginning of the harvest season on 1 August and was called Lammas, meaning 'loaf Mass'. The Latin prayer to hallow the bread is given in the Durham Ritual. Farmers made loaves of bread from the fresh wheat crop. These were given to the local church as the Communion bread during a special service thanking God for the harvest.

By the sixteenth century a number of customs seem to have been firmly established around the gathering of the final harvest. They include the reapers accompanying a fully laden cart; a tradition of shouting "Hooky, hooky"; and one of the foremost reapers dressing extravagantly, acting as 'lord' of the harvest and asking for money from the onlookers. A play by Thomas Nashe, Summer's Last Will and Testament, (first published in London in 1600 but believed from internal evidence to have been first performed in October 1592 at Croydon) contains a scene which demonstrates several of these features. There is a character personifying harvest who comes on stage attended by men dressed as reapers; he refers to himself as their "master" and ends the scene by begging the audience for a "largesse". The scene is clearly inspired by contemporary harvest celebrations, and singing and drinking feature largely. The stage instruction reads:

<poem>"Enter Haruest with a sythe on his neck, & all his reapers with siccles, and a great black bowle with a posset in it borne before him: they come in singing."</poem>

The song which follows may be an actual harvest song, or a creation of the author's intended to represent a typical harvest song of the time:

<poem>

Merry, merry, merry, cheary, cheary, cheary, Trowle the black bowl to me ; Hey derry, derry, with a poupe and a lerry, Ile trowle it again to the:

Hooky, hooky, we have shorn, And we have bound, And we have brought Harvest Home to town.

</poem>

The shout of "hooky, hooky" appears to be one traditionally associated with the harvest celebration. The last verse is repeated in full after the character Harvest remarks to the audience "Is your throat cleare to helpe us sing hooky, hooky?" and a stage direction adds, "Heere they all sing after him". Also, in 1555 in Archbishop Parker's translation of Psalm 126 occur the lines:

<poem>

"He home returnes: wyth hocky cry, With sheaues full lade abundantly."

</poem>

In some parts of England "Hoakey" or "Horkey" (the word is spelled variously) became the accepted name of the actual festival itself:

<poem>

"Hoacky is brought Home with hallowing Boys with plum-cake The Cart following".

</poem>

Another widespread tradition was the distribution of a special cake to the celebrating farmworkers. A prose work of 1613 refers to the practice as predating the Reformation. Describing the character of a typical farmer, it says:

<poem>"Rocke Munday..Christmas Eve, the hoky, or seed cake, these he yeerely keepes, yet holds them no reliques of popery."[9]</poem>

Early English settlers took the idea of harvest thanksgiving to North America. The most famous one is the harvest Thanksgiving held by the Pilgrims in 1621.

Presidential Harvest Festival in Spała, Poland

Nowadays the festival is held at the end of harvest, which varies in different parts of Britain. Sometimes neighboring churches will set the Harvest Festival on different Sundays so that people can attend each other's thanksgivings.

Until the twentieth century most farmers celebrated the end of the harvest with a big meal called the harvest supper, to which all who had helped in the harvest were invited. It was sometimes known as a "Mell-supper", after the last patch of corn or wheat standing in the fields which was known as the "Mell" or "Neck". Cutting it signified the end of the work of harvest and the beginning of the feast. There seems to have been a feeling that it was bad luck to be the person to cut the last stand of corn. The farmer and his workers would race against the harvesters on other farms to be first to complete the harvest, shouting to announce they had finished. In some counties the last stand of corn would be cut by the workers throwing their sickles at it until it was all down, in others the reapers would take it in turns to be blindfolded and sweep a scythe to and fro until all of the Mell was cut down.

Some churches and villages still have a Harvest Supper. The modern British tradition of celebrating Harvest Festival in churches began in 1843, when the Reverend Robert Hawker invited parishioners to a special thanksgiving service at his church at Morwenstow in Cornwall. Victorian hymns such as We plough the fields and scatter, Come, ye thankful people, come and All things bright and beautiful but also Dutch and German harvest hymns in translation helped popularise his idea of harvest festival, and spread the annual custom of decorating churches with home-grown produce for the Harvest Festival service. On 8 September 1854 the Revd Dr William Beal, Rector of Brooke, Norfolk,[10] held a Harvest Festival aimed at ending what he saw as disgraceful scenes at the end of harvest, and went on to promote 'harvest homes' in other Norfolk villages. Another early adopter of the custom as an organised part of the Church of England calendar was Rev Piers Claughton at Elton, Huntingdonshire in or about 1854.[11]

As British people have come to rely less heavily on home-grown produce, there has been a shift in emphasis in many Harvest Festival celebrations. Increasingly, churches have linked Harvest with an awareness of and concern for people in the developing world for whom growing crops of sufficient quality and quantity remains a struggle. Development and Relief organisations often produce resources for use in churches at harvest time which promote their own concerns for those in need across the globe.

In the early days, there were ceremonies and rituals at the beginning as well as at the end of the harvest.

Encyclopædia Britannica traces the origins to "the animistic belief in the corn [grain] spirit or corn mother." In some regions the farmers believed that a spirit resided in the last sheaf of grain to be harvested. To chase out the spirit, they beat the grain to the ground. Elsewhere they wove some blades of the cereal into a "corn dolly" that they kept safe for "luck" until seed-sowing the following year.[citation needed] Then they plowed the ears of grain back into the soil in hopes that this would bless the new crop.

  • Church bells could be heard on each day of the harvest.
  • A corn dolly was made from the last sheaf of corn harvested. The corn dolly often had a place of honour at the banquet table, and was kept until the following spring.
  • In Cornwall, the ceremony of Crying The Neck was practiced. Today it is still re-enacted annually by The Old Cornwall Society.
  • The horse bringing the last cart load was decorated with garlands of flowers and colourful ribbons.
  • A magnificent Harvest feast was held at the farmer's house and games played to celebrate the end of the harvest.

Around the World

North America

Saying grace before carving the turkey at Thanksgiving dinner

In North America, Canada and the US each have their own Thanksgiving celebrations in October and November.

Thanksgiving is celebrated on the fourth Thursday in November, at the end of the harvest season, as an annual American Federal holiday to express thanks for one's material and spiritual possessions. Traditionally, it is a time to give thanks for the harvest and express gratitude in general.

Thanksgiving dinner is usually as a gathering of family members and friends. It is a day for watching football games, parades, and television specials. Thanksgiving is now primarily identified as a secular holiday, albeit of historical, legendary, and symbolic significance related to the deliverance of the English settlers by Native Americans after the brutal winter at Plymouth, Massachusetts.

In Canada, Thanksgiving, or Thanksgiving Day (Canadian French: Jour d'action de grâce), occurs on the second Monday in October. It is an annual holiday to give thanks at the close of the harvest season. Although some people thank God for this bounty, the holiday is mainly considered secular.

The history of Thanksgiving in Canada goes back to the explorer, Martin Frobisher, who was seeking a northern passage to the Pacific Ocean. Frobisher's Thanksgiving was not for harvest but homecoming; having safely returned from his search for the Northwest Passage, avoiding the later fate of Henry Hudson and Sir John Franklin. In the year 1578, he held a formal ceremony in what is now the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, to give thanks for surviving the long journey.

Frobisher's feast was one of the first Thanksgiving celebrations in North America, although celebrating the harvest and giving thanks for a successful bounty of crops had been a long-standing tradition before the arrival of Europeans.

Many Native Americans had organized harvest festivals, ceremonial dances, and other celebrations of thanks for centuries. Today, these festivals, giving thanks to the Great Spirit and to nature for the harvest from crops, continue to be celebrated in homes, at Pow wows, and on reservations.[12]

United Kingdom

In the United Kingdom, thanks have been given for successful harvests since pagan times. Harvest festival is traditionally held on the Sunday near or of the Harvest Moon. This is the full Moon that occurs closest to the autumn equinox (22 or 23 September). The celebrations on this day usually include singing hymns, praying, and decorating churches with baskets of fruit and food in the festival known as Harvest Festival, Harvest Home, Harvest Thanksgiving or Harvest Festival of Thanksgiving.

In British and English-Caribbean churches, chapels and schools, and some Canadian churches, people bring in produce from the garden, the allotment or farm. The food is often distributed among the poor and senior citizens of the local community, or used to raise funds for the church, or charity.

Asia

Jesasang ceremonial table setting for Korean ancestor veneration, held on Chuseok
Typical lotus bean-filled mooncakes eaten during the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival
Animal-shaped mooncakes in Vietnam

Harvest festivals in Asia include the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋節), one of the most widely spread harvest festivals in the world. The festival is held on the 15th day of the 8th month of the lunar calendar with a full moon at night, corresponding to mid September to early October of the Gregorian calendar.[13]

This festival is celebrated notably by the Chinese and Vietnamese people,[14] however similar festivals of Chuseok (in Korea) and Tsukimi (in Japan) are also held at this time. The Japanese moon viewing festival, o-tsukimi, is a time for people to picnic and drink sake under the full moon to celebrate the harvest.

Chuseok (추석; 秋夕), literally "Autumn eve", is a major harvest festival and a three-day holiday in North Korea and South Korea . As a celebration of the good harvest, Koreans visit their ancestral hometowns and share a feast of Korean traditional food such as songpyeon (송편) and rice wines such as sindoju and dongdongju.

The festival celebrates three fundamental concepts that are closely connected:

  • Gathering, such as family and friends coming together, or harvesting crops for the festival. It is said the moon is the brightest and roundest on this day which means family reunion. Consequently, this is the main reason why the festival is thought to be important.
  • Thanksgiving, to give thanks for the harvest, or for harmonious unions
  • Praying (asking for conceptual or material satisfaction), such as for babies, a spouse, beauty, longevity, or for a good future

Traditions and myths surrounding the festival are formed around these concepts, although they have changed over time due to changes in technology, science, economy, culture, and religion.[15]

The Chinese have celebrated the harvest during the autumn full moon since the Shang dynasty (c. 1600–1046 B.C.E.).[15] although a festival celebration only started to gain popularity during the early Tang dynasty (618–907 C.E.). Legend explains that Emperor Xuanzong of Tang started to hold formal celebrations in his palace after having explored the Moon-Palace.[15] For the Baiyue, indigenous non-Chinese peoples, the harvest time commemorated the dragon who brought rain for the crops.[14]

Making and sharing mooncakes, a rich pastry typically filled with sweet-bean or lotus-seed paste, are traditionally eaten during the festival. is one of the hallmark traditions of this festival. In Chinese culture, a round shape symbolizes completeness and reunion. Thus, the sharing and eating of round mooncakes among family members during the week of the festival signifies the completeness and unity of families.

Mid-Autumn Festival lanterns in Chinatown, Singapore

A notable part of celebrating the holiday is the carrying of brightly lit lanterns, lighting lanterns on towers, or floating sky lanterns.[16] Another tradition involving lanterns is to write riddles on them and have other people try to guess the answers (simplified Chinese: 灯谜; traditional Chinese: 燈謎; Template:!(Template:!(pinyin]]: dēng mí; literally "lantern riddle").[17]

It is difficult to discern the original purpose of lanterns in connection to the festival, but it is certain that lanterns were not used in conjunction with moon-worship prior to the Tang dynasty.[15] Traditionally, the lantern has been used to symbolize fertility, and functioned mainly as a toy and decoration. But today the lantern has come to symbolize the festival itself.[15]

Vietnamese children celebrating the Mid-Autumn Festival with traditional 5-pointed star-shaped lantern

The Mid-Autumn festival is named "Tết Trung Thu" in Vietnamese. It is also known as Children's Festival because of the event's emphasis on children.[18] In olden times, the Vietnamese believed that children, being innocent and pure, had the closest connection to the sacred and natural world. Being close to children was seen as a way to connect with animist spirits and deities.[19]

In its most ancient form, the evening commemorated the dragon who brought rain for the crops. Celebrants would observe the moon to divine the future of the people and harvests. Eventually the celebration came to symbolize a reverence for fertility, with prayers given for bountiful harvests, increase in livestock, and human babies. Over time, the prayers for children evolved into a celebration of children.[14]

Jewish celebration

Jews celebrate the week-long harvest festival of Sukkot in the autumn. Coming as it does at the completion of the harvest, Sukkot is regarded as a general thanksgiving for the bounty of nature in the year that had passed. The holiday is a particularly joyous one, in which Gentiles as well as Jews are invited to participate.

According to the biblical books of Exodus and Deuteronomy, Sukkot had an agricultural origin. It was known, among other titles, as the "Feast of Ingathering" and was to be held "at the end of the year when you gather in your labors out of the field" (Ex. 23:16) and "after you have gathered in from your threshing-floor and from your winepress" (Deut. 16:13). Other biblical traditions, however, associate the holiday with the period of the Israelites' wandering in the wilderness, when they lived and worshiped in portable structures in the wilderness under the leadership of Moses.

Observant Jews build a temporary hut or shack called a sukkah, and spend the week living, eating, sleeping, and praying inside of it. A sukkah has only three walls and a semi-open roof to allow the elements to enter. It is reminiscent of the structures Israelite farmers would live in during the harvest, at the end of which they would bring a portion to the Temple in Jerusalem.

The tradition was apparently similar to the pagan festival described in Judges 9:27: "After they had gone out into the fields and gathered the grapes and trodden them, they held a festival in the temple of their god."

Notes

  1. T.C. Cokayne, ed. Leechdoms, Wortcunning and Starcarft (Rolls Series) vol. III:291, noted by George C. Homans, English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century, 2nd ed. 1991:371.
  2. J.P. Bacon Phillips, inquiring the significance of "gule", "Lammas-Day and the Gule of August", Notes and Queries, 2 August 1930:83.
  3. Hutton, The Stations of the Sun, Oxford 1996.
  4. Pettingall, in Archaeologia or, Miscellaneous tracts, relating to antiquity... (Society of Antiquaries of London), 2:67.
  5. Brady, Clavis Calendaris, 1812, etc. s.v. "Lammas-Day".
  6. Reported without comment in John Brand, Henry Ellis, J.O. Halliwell-Phillips, Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, new ed. 1899: vol. I, s.v. "Lammas".
  7. Noted by Homans 1991:371.
  8. Homans 1991:371.
  9. Overbury, Thomas Characters: the Franklin, London, 1613
  10. Dictionary of National Biography
  11. Burn-Murdoch, Bob (1996). What's So Special About Huntingdonshire?. St Ives: Friends of the Norris Museum. ISBN 0-9525900-1-8. 
  12. Patty Inglish, Native American Harvest Feasts Before Thanksgiving Owlcation, November 7, 2016. Retrieved September 14, 2019.
  13. Huge celebration Xinhua, August 29, 2014. Retrieved September 14, 2019.
  14. 14.0 14.1 14.2 Nguyen Van Huy and Laurel Kendall (eds.), Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind, and Spirit (University of California Press, 2003, ISBN 978-0520238725).
  15. 15.0 15.1 15.2 15.3 15.4 Kin Wai Michael Siu, Lanterns of the mid-Autumn Festival: A Reflection of Hong Kong Cultural Change The Journal of Popular Culture 33(2) (1999):67–86. Retrieved September 14, 2019.
  16. Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named xinhua
  17. Yang, Lemei (Sep–Dec 2006). China's Mid-Autumn Day. Journal of Folklore Research 43 (3): 263–270.
  18. Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named lee
  19. Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named cohen

References
ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

  • Franklin, Anna, and Paul Mason. Lammas: Celebrating the Fruits of the First Harvest. Llewellyn Publications, 2001. ISBN 0738700940
  • Máire, MacNeill. The Festival of Lughnasa. Oxford University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0906426104
  • Richardson, Betsy. Thanksgiving & Other Festivals of the Harvest. Mason Crest Publishers, 2018. ISBN 1422241521
  • Van Huy, Nguyen, and Laurel Kendall (eds.). Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind, and Spirit. University of California Press, 2003. ISBN 978-0520238725
  • Whitlock, Ralph. Thanksgiving and Harvest (Holidays and Festivals). Rourke Pub. Group, 1987. ISBN 0865929769

External links

All links retrieved

Credits

New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats.The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here:

The history of this article since it was imported to New World Encyclopedia:

Note: Some restrictions may apply to use of individual images which are separately licensed.