Teaching Comparative

Thankfully, a break

I'm going to take a break for my favorite holiday and give thanks for everything I can think of. Sometime in the fall, most other people also take time to reflect on their own reasons for being thankful.

• In Britain, we have given thanks for successful harvests since pagan times. We celebrate this day by singing, praying and decorating our churches with baskets of fruit and food in a festival known as 'Harvest Festival', usually during the month of September.


• In Scotland they celebrate the harvest festival known as "Lammas"
  
  meaning loaf mass. A loaf of bread is made from the first wheat that is cut. This is then taken to church for which the bread is eaten for the Mass.In the Scotland Isles they have the festival after the men have come back from the deep-sea fishing.


• Also in Scotland they hold a festival known as St. Michael's Mass or Michaelmas and it is held on September 29. Fairs with markets and games, especially horseracing are associated. It is associated with the color gold, all the harvest colors, the harvest and bounty of the land, and the sacred king.


• On the eve of the last harvest, all of the local wives would get together and bake cakes and pies, amongst many other things, for the harvest home feast which in Welsh is ffest y pen.


• Dozhinki is a Slavic harvest festival. It is… the completion of the harvest
  
  ritual, falling in many places August 15 (28), in other places celebrated in September. By mid-August harvest grain ends, hence the name of the holiday. Includes the rituals associated with last sheaf, the ritual of "curling beard" and a celebratory meal.


• Chinese Moon Festival is traditionally celebrated on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunisolar month (see Mid-Autumn Festival Dates), which is in September or October. Mid-Autumn Festival 2014 is on September 8. Chinese people will have a three-day holiday from September 6 to 8.


• The Mid-autumn festival is the second most important festival after the Spring Festival to Chinese people. Every year, when the festival comes people go home from every corner of the country and the world to meet their family and have dinner with them, admire the full moon and eat mooncakes.


• Each year at the height of the rainy season (mid-July), the people would gather and pay homage to "Centeotl", the corn goddess, to ensure a bountiful harvest.


• During the Spanish occupation, Catholic missionaries disapproved of these pagan rituals. As a result, the church promoted the feast of the Virgin of Carmen, celebrated on the 16th of July, as an alternative to the corn goddess festivities.


• Eventually both cultures and traditions combined to evolve into the modern
  
  La Guelaguetza festival celebrated today.


• The Osun Festival is held at the end of the rainy season, usually in August, at the Oshogbo Sacred Forest. The week-long festival is held in honor of the river goddess Oshun, an important Yoruba deity, and is attended by thousands of people.


• Yam Festivals are popular holiday in Ghana and Nigeria, usually held in the beginning of August at the end of the rainy season... People offer yams to gods and ancestors before distributing them to the villagers to give thanks to the spirits above them.

Labels: Harvest festivals, political culture

posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:30 AM