Harvest Home (pagan festival)

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Harvest Home is the name of a traditional pagan harvest festival celebrated in England. Other names for the same festival include Ingathering, Inning, and Kern (possibly a corruption of the word corn). Today it is associated with the neopagan holiday of Mabon, as well as being one of the forerunners of the modern Thanksgiving.

The Harvest Home festival was celebrated at the end of the harvest season, on the occasion of the harvest of the last sheaf of grain. (The festival of Lammas was celebrated at the start of the harvest season.) Typically, the last sheaf would be fashioned into a corn dolly, known variously as the cailleac ("old woman" in Gaelic), the Corn-Mother, or the Harvest Queen. In some areas, the sheaf would be fashioned into a Kern-Baby in the case of an early harvest and a Kern-Mother in the case the harvest was late. The cailleac would be paraded through the village and ultimately drenched with water in a ritual intended to ensure good rains in the next season.

At the end of the festival, the cailleac was typically stored until the next planting season, when it would be plowed into the first furrow. In some traditions, the cailleac was given to the farmer with the smallest harvest as a good-luck charm or mark of shame. In others, it was kept by the farmer who harvested it, and fed to his horses or oxen at the start of the planting season.