Harvest Home

Thanksgiving is not a harvest festival.

It's much too late in the year for that. In fact, the only popular Thanksgiving song, "Over the River and Through the Wood," makes clear that this is a cold and snowy holiday. I'm sure most folks have heard the whole bit about the Civil War and national days of Thanksgiving going back to colonial times, but Thanksgiving as we know it (an annual snowy feast) is a New England tradition that has to do not with the harvest but with Christmas.

Yes, Christmas. See, the Puritans were too puritanical to celebrate pagan (i.e. Anglo-Catholic) Christmas, but their children were crafty enough to gradually work in an annual non-Christmas Christmas the month before. In much the same way, the Puritans of England outlawed Halloween as too Catholic, but Halloween found a backdoor in Guy Fawkes Night, which was acceptable precisely because it was anti-Catholic. Still: costumes, fires, macabre autumn revelry; pretty much the same deal.

Many Thanksgiving traditions have been obliquely inherited from the actual harvest festivals of Europe and the Colonies: namely, Harvest Home (which celebrates the end of the harvest) and Michaelmas (which falls pretty close by). Both occur near the autumnal equinox in September. Today neopagans like to call the equinox Mabon, but the English and Pennsylvania Deutsch have always kept it as Harvest Home.

Of course, one of the most popular Thanksgiving traditions in early 20th Century urban America was trick-or-treat. During the Depression, however, this smelt a bit too much like class warfare and Thanksgiving trick-or-treat was outlawed by the powers that be. Not to be denied, however, the youth of America simply transferred their belovedly anarchic tradition to the nearest holiday: Halloween (which is also clearly not a harvest festival, despite postmodern claims to the contrary). Thanksgiving trick-or-treating lives on vestigially in the Mummers' Parade.

My point is, if you want to celebrate a harvest festival, September is the time. Sing a Harvest Home hymn: "Come Ye Thankful People Come." Light a bonfire for St Michael and All Angels. September marks the close of the harvest. Let us be thankful for the bounty of Creation, and sing the Creator's praise in proper season.