Pumpkin lantern / tea light holder made of ceramic, painted

Harvest festival - Autumn harvest festival - Equinox.

For the Germanic peoples, the harvest festival lasted three days from September 21st to 23rd. They held a great feast and drank mead. The gods were thanked for the harvest. They left a tuft of grain in the field so that Odin's horse, Sleipnir, would also have something to eat. A wreath was braided from the last of the grain harvest. As an offering, people also liked to leave the last apple on the tree.

Sometimes a harvest fire was lit for this purpose, and it was also customary to throw a small fruit offering, grains of corn, and other gifts into the fire.

 

Samhain (so-called Halloween) is one of the four great Irish-Celtic festivals and takes place on the night of October 31st to November 1st. It is a festival of the dead, on which the ancestors are commemorated. It was believed that during this time, the souls of the dead returned to their homes. The festival also celebrated the end of summer and the bringing of livestock into the stables.

 

Customs and traditions sometimes differ or overlap in different cultures. Samhain and the autumn harvest festival are of pagan origin, partly persecuted by the Christian Church, reinterpreted, or used/misused for their purposes.

 

It is up to us to cultivate the old customs again in their original tradition....