Assembly: Lammas: Celebrating the First Harvest

Our tradition at FUS is to mark Lammas, the first harvest-related celebration of the year in pagan/agricultural calendars, on the first Sunday of August. Considering that many of us live and/or work in urban areas and are separated from the labor involved in producing the food we eat, Lammas may seem remotely relevant to our lives. But is there a deeper meaning to this ancient holiday day that is worth exploring?

Phil Duran of the Seasonal Celebrations Team will be speaking with music by the FUS house band, the Eclectics. At the close of the program we will celebrate the first harvest and our community with that time-honored tradition of sharing bread—baked by our own FUS members.

Lammas or Loaf Mass Day marks a cross-quarter in the wheel of the year—the midpoint from summer to autumn. It commemorates the early wheat harvest, traditionally the first harvest festival of the year. In times past, among some of the English–speaking countries in the Northern Hemisphere, it was customary to bring a loaf of bread to church on this day made from the new crop. In many parts of England, tenants were bound to present freshly harvested wheat to their landlords on or before the first day of August. In the Anglo–Saxon Chronicle, where it is referred to regularly, Lammas is known as “the feast of first fruits.”