Harvest festival

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.

Visitors from different parts of the Persian Empire brought gifts for the king, all contributing to a lively festival.

Observant Jews build a temporary hut or shack called a sukkah, and spend the week living, eating, sleeping, and praying inside it.

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 stage instruction reads: "Enter Harvest with a scythe on his neck, and all his reapers with sickles, and a great black bowl with a posset in it borne before him: they come in singing."

Also, in 1555 in Archbishop Parker's translation of Psalm 126 occur the lines: "He home returnes: wyth hocky cry, With sheaues full lade abundantly."

Describing the character of a typical farmer, it says: "Rocke Munday..Christmas Eve, the hoky, or seed cake, these he yearly keeps, yet holds them no relics of popery.

Another early adopter of the custom as an organized part of the Church of England calendar was Rev Piers Claughton at Elton, Huntingdonshire in or about 1854.

[3] 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 organizations often produce resources for use in churches at harvest time which promote their own concerns for those in need across the globe.