Reason with a View

Part 3 of Thanksgiving Around the World — a six-part series on harvest thanksgiving across every inhabited continent, running through Thanksgiving Day. Before we travel today, a word about home: it's Veterans Day here in the United States, and a series about thanksgiving ought to start with the people who have stood guard over everything else this series celebrates. To every man and woman who has worn the uniform — thank you. In Part 2 we were in Asia, where an emperor still tastes the first rice of the year before anyone else sits down to eat. Europe tells the same story in a different accent — and Europe adds a twist. Here, harvest thanksgiving didn't just survive in villages and farmhouses. It got written onto the church calendar, nearly lost more than once, and carried into the present by people who simply refused to stop. And it starts, the way so much in Europe starts, with the Greeks. The oldest of Europe's harvest rites that we know in any detail belonged to wo...

Songpyeon — the crescent rice cakes of Chuseok, steamed over pine needles. Photo: Korea.net / Korean Culture and Information Service, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Part 2 of Thanksgiving Around the World — a six-part series on harvest thanksgiving across every inhabited continent, running through Thanksgiving Day. In Part 1 we were in Africa, where the rule underneath every harvest festival was the same: the first of the harvest isn't yours. Asia keeps that rule — and in one place, it wrote it into law. Start in the Levant, with the Feast of Sukkot. In the Bible it's called the Feast of Ingathering, and the name tells you what it was: the year's work, gathered in. Grain threshed, grapes pressed, olives picked — and then, before anyone settled in to enjoy it, the whole nation moved outside. For seven days, families ate and slept in booths — rough shelters of branches — to remember that their ancestors had lived in shelters too, on the road out of Egypt, with nothi...

Part 1 of Thanksgiving Around the World — a six-part series on harvest thanksgiving across every inhabited continent, running through Thanksgiving Day. Renenutet, cobra goddess of the harvest, from the tomb of Qenamun, Egypt — a copy of a painting some 3,400 years old. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain.) Long before there was a United States, before there was a Plymouth or a President Lincoln, human beings were doing what we do every fourth Thursday of November — stopping at harvest time to say thank you. And the oldest written-down chapter of that story is African, in Egypt, where the whole year was built around one river. Ancient Egypt lived and died by the Nile flood. The year had three seasons, and all three were about water and grain: the flood, the growing, and the harvest. When the harvest came in, thanks came first — and I mean that literally. At the threshing floor, where the grain was beaten loose, farmers set up little altars and bowls as offerings to Renenute...