MelissaA
Brenton
Shilpa Karhik
From The Harvest Festival To Thanksgiving
October 9th 2007 09:31
Take for instance my new knowledge of Britain's Harvest Festival, a cultural celebration of which I knew nothing about. I did however know about America and Thanksgiving. It turns out that the two are actually somewhat related.
Ever since ancient pagan times in Britain, there has been a celebration of food and the time for harvesting it.
Harvest Festival used to be celebrated at the beginning of August and was called 'Lammas', meaning 'loaf Mass' as 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.
Early settlers took the idea of harvest thanksgiving to North America. The most famous one is of course the harvest Thanksgiving held by the Pilgrims in 1621. Today, a specific date is set aside for Thanksgiving as a public holiday.
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. He helped popularise his idea of harvest festival and spread the annual custom of decorating churches with home-grown produce for the Harvest Festival service.
Today, the school children of Britain collect non-perishable foods such as tinned soups and vegetables and compile a sizeable amount of food items at school to be donated to a local facility or charity in need of such items to help spread the 'harvest' in the spirit of Christianity.
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