Query about celebrating Harvest Festival

[Bonsoir]

I need clarification. My understanding (and memory) is that Harvest Festival is an Anglican festival and that is celebrated extensively in primary schools in England, in conjunction with Harvest Assemblies/prayers and singing of Harvest hymns (We Plough The Fields and Scatter..., Come Ye Thankful People Come) and collection of food for distribution to the needy, as well as being celebrated in Churches. Can anyone point me in the direction of entirely secular (pagan) celebrations of Harvest Festival in the UK?

www.storm-crow.co.uk/articles/lammas.html

Although I've never heard of it in the UK. Is that what you meant?!

I wasn't very clear. I meant, are there UK primary schools that celebrate Harvest Festival with absolutely no religious celebration - as a pagan festival?

We celebrate harvest in assembly time and children bring in produce to display.

It's certainly not anywhere close to being religious! It consists of a little 'inspired' discussion about the seasons and food production, followed by a singsong of 'Cauliflowers Fluffy' which everyone enjoys. Then we sell the produce at the end of the day, and proceeds go to charity. I'm not even sure we said a prayer this year

BTW - neither did we refer to any Celtic gods of the corn, or similar!

DS1's school harvest festival didn't seem to have any religious content - they took in fresh produce for a big display in the hall and talked about where it came from, and sang 'Cauliflowers fluffy' (must be the default non-religious harvest song!) .

Perhaps you went to mine, Meg!

fraidylady No not everyone enjoys CAuliflowers fluffy'. It's banned in my house after a month of continual singing!

The pagan version is Samhain; I'm not aware of any schools which celebrate it.

I work in an infant school. This year's harvest assembly consisted of a display at the front of vegetables grown by our school's garden and nature club, an explanation of what harvest time is and the singing of "cauliflower's fluffy." Not religious at all.

Ah! I have a vague memory of the assembly and it definitely mentioned samhain! So maybe we did have a pagan festival! I'm just trying to imagine singing Cauliflowers Fluffy as the lamb is sacrificed.

Singing Cauliflowers Fluffy rather than We Plough the Fields and Scatter at Harvest Festival is like singing Jingle Bells instead of Away in a Manger at Christmas Time...

I went to the harvest assembly at my children's school and they sang songs like "Big Red Combine Harvester" and ones about fruit and veg. No religious songs. In between the songs the children performed poems and stories like Little Red Hen.
Never heard of Cauliflowers Fluffy and won't be googling as I know it will be addictive.

Actually Samhain is the Pagan equivalent of haloween, Lammas is the Pagan harvest festival. That would be considered a religious festival being Pagan. I think pleanty of schools hold a harvest festival with no religious content, its a pretty universal festival being celbrated one way or another in most cultures i think.

DS' school celebrates the harvest (not that many of the inner-city dwelling kids will have actually ever seen a field of ripe wheat being harvested etc) without any religious connotations.

They collect goods suitable for distribution to a local homeless project, have readings about change of summer to autumn, poems etc, sing a variety of songs including look at harvests around the world - rice, etc.

Lammas isn't really Harvest Festival - it's a celebration of the first cutting at the start of the harvest, and falls at the start of August.

Samhain is the "Harvest Home" festival which more nearly equates to the Christian Harvest Festival which is, like the US version Thanksgiving, a festival of thanks that all us safely gathered in. It falls on the same date as Hallowe'en (the Christian festivals often fall at the times of older or different celebrations) and Hallowe'en's pumpkins and apple-bobbing are probably a relic of the older festival. But the rest of Hallowe'en (nearness of spirits and demons etc) is a Christian myth arising in relation to the power of All Hallows.

The main UK religious Harvest Festival falls between Lammas and Samhain.

Gah i didn't mean Lammas i meant Mabon (multi tasking failure!) which falls between the Lammas and Samhain. Samhain is actually celebrated with the feast of the dead so very much has links with halloween but is indeed a very different festival with no references to demons etc as you say.

Samhain doesn't have to be anything to do with the dead: the heart of the festival is definitely the harvest.

Mabon is lovely and I'd like to see it better known. Especially the Green Man, so one can look forward to Yule and reclaiming Father Christmas.

Well we obviously celebrate different versions of Samhain. We celebrate it as the time when the veil between ours and the spirit world is at it's thinnest and a time when we gather together our harvest and cook up a huge feast to share with our family we also leave out food for our friends and family who are no longer with us and light candles for them and talk about and remember them. Symbolically everything around us is dying, the leaves are shedding the crops are over etc. We also use it as a time to right down the things that we would like to leave in the old year and burn them on a fire, moving into the new year without them. It's always nice to hear about the way other people celebrate the festivals though.