Celebrating harvest doesn’t seem the same these days…

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Little One’s school (which is a church school) will be holding their harvest festival celebration soon. As part of that, the children are asked to bring gifts of food, which will afterwards be donated to the local hostel for homeless people. Of course this is a worthy cause, and I completely understand that such an organisation can’t cope with a donation of loads of perishable foodstuffs all at once. But still I feel that the connection to the real meaning of ‘harvest’ is missing. When I was at primary school it was very different. I went to a little village school, with about 40 children in total. For the harvest festival we would all bring donations of fruit or vegetables, and the local baker would create a wheatsheaf-shaped loaf specially as a centrepiece. I still remember admiring the heaped up vegetables and fruits making the display, as we sang ‘We plough the fields and scatter…’ But even then in many cases the direct connection to ‘harvest’ was missing - the produce was often bought from the greengrocer rather than actually grown by the families themselves. Now Little One’s school has about ten times as many pupils and we all take donations of canned beans and boxes of teabags. That seems even further removed. It must be more difficult for the children to understand how grateful we are for the harvest when we just have to buy it from the supermarket. But maybe climate change and the various ‘crises’ of food and fuel will bring it home to them… All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2021.