Crowning the year with goodness: on the joy of Harvest Thanksgiving season

We are reaching the end of Harvest Thanksgiving season. Since mid-September, churches across these Islands have been decorated with agricultural produce, 'Come, ye thankful people, come' has been heartily sung, and, we have prayed, in the words of the Church of Ireland collect, "you crown the year with your goodness".

It is a season that I thoroughly enjoy. I delight in walking into the parish church and seeing it decorated for harvest. Musically challenged as I am, I gladly join in the harvest hymns. After my own parish's Harvest Thanksgiving, I try to ensure that I attend Evening Prayer in other local parishes on the Sundays when they observe Harvest Thanksgiving. I drink deeply of this season.

But am I merely indulging in Victorian nostalgia? The tired trope that Harvest Thanksgiving is a 'Victorian invention' has been previously addressed on Laudable Practice. Officially published Forms of Prayer and Thanksgiving throughout the 18th century gave thanks for the harvest, while harvest sermons were also common. No 'invention' was required in the 19th century: it was merely a restatement of what had been common practice.

The same was the case in the lands that would become Canada. As commentator Geoff Russ has recently stated of Thanksgiving in Canada:

the traditions we associate with it were largely brought over by the Loyalists, who established them in Ontario and the Maritimes. These are centuries-old connections, placing Thanksgiving among our most deeply rooted holidays in Anglo-Canada, whatever date Canadian officials eventually assigned it. The custom of a harvest feast was not invented by any government. 

It did not require either government or synod to move 18th century Anglicans - whether in these Islands or in British North America - to give thanks for the harvest. It was, rather, a natural, instinctive, organic act. What is more, it cohered with patterns inherent to the Book of Common Prayer, from praying in the Litany "That it may please thee to give and preserve to our use the kindly fruits of the earth, so as in due time we may enjoy them", to the words of the General Thanksgiving, "We bless thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life". 

Little wonder, then, that we find the September Embertide prayer in John Cosin's 1627 A Collection of Private Devotions explicitly give thanks for the harvest season:

Almighty God, who givest to all life, and breath, and all things; and bringest forth good out of the earth for the use of man ... the fruits of the ground which thou hast now given us, and all other temporal blessings wherewith thou crownest the year ... 

When, therefore, I rejoice in the harvest - when I sing the Harvest Thanksgiving hymns, take joy in the pumpkins in the parish church, and dwell on "Thou crownest the year with thy goodness" - I am not merely engaging in Victorian nostalgia. I am, rather, following the "old paths ... the good way" (Jeremiah 6.16), doing what those who have gone before me have done, year by year, naturally, organically.

Surrounded by the blessings of the harvest, I am also aware of the richness of the good earth in this season. It is, as Washington Irving declared, "jolly autumn". And "jolly autumn" calls forth from me thanksgiving:

It was, as I have said, a fine autumnal day; the sky was clear and serene, and nature wore that rich and golden livery which we always associate with the idea of abundance. 

How can I not, amidst rich autumnal beauty, give thanks to the Creator? As for those who might say that such autumnal colours are merely "marks of fading and withering", I point to William Paley:

It seems a lame account to call it, as it has been called, a disease of the plant. Is it not more probable, that this property, which is independent, as it should seem, of the wants and utilities of the plant, was calculated for beauty, intended for display?

In addition to the bounty of the fruits of the earth and the autumnal colours, there is another reason which, I think, naturally, organically draws me to give thanks at this season. As the leaves turn and then begin to fall, as the days shorten and start to cool, there is a sense in which we recognise the year's decline. Another year is passing. In the words of Thoreau:

As fruits and leaves and the day itself acquire a bright tint just before they fall, so the year near its setting. October is its sunset sky; November the later twilight.

We are in the year's sunset. The mercies and goodness of God have held me through the year that is passing, another year of my earthly life. Thanks is to be given unto Him, from whom all blessings come.

Now, in mid-October, Harvest Thanksgiving begins to peter out. A few parishes here and there have their Harvest Thanksgivings later in this month. For most of us, Harvest Thanksgiving is past for this year. It continues to echo, however, as I watch the golden leaves fall, see pumpkins on the doorstep, and attend the last of the Autumn fairs - buying jams, tasting mushroom soup, enjoying hot apple cider. For those who will say that all this is Victorian nostalgia, rather than engage in a tiresome debate, I prefer merely to remind them of Donne's words: "in heaven it is always autumn".