Equinox and corn dollies

In the United Kingdom, a traditional Harvest Home celebration took place on the full moon Sunday closest to the September equinox. The last food crop load was decorated with ribbons or flowers and brought in with singing, shouting, and big partying. The Harvest Home song went something like this:

Harvest home, harvest home!
We've plowed, we've sowed
We've reaped, we've mowed
And brought home safe, every load.

(beer helped)

As part of the celebration, a doll made of the last harvest sheaf was carried back on a wagon or held on a pole by a harvester. She was pelted with apples and later burned. The tradition goes back to early matriarchal societies where crop fertility was supposedly assured by the sacrifice of such symbols. But some part of the doll was also given to horses or cattle to eat, or strewn in fields to ensure next year's harvest.

The autumnal equinox occurs this evening, when the center of the sun is on the same plane as the earth's equator. Something to ponder: there are only two days in the year when day and night are roughly the same length at every location on earth. Today is one of them.

The picture above was downloaded from the mesmerizing website http://www.die.net/earth/ which shows a computer-generated illustration of the earth's pattern of sunlight and darkness, along with real-time weather satellite imagery. (It's also great for looking at hurricanes.) I downloaded this picture a few days ago at 2:00 pm Pacific time. The sharp vertical line dividing night and day is only seen during the spring and fall equinoxes, when we have approximately 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness.

Autumn
Alphonse Mucha

Here in Seattle, fall is coming in quickly and we had the lowest overnight temperatures since last spring. Rain tomorrow, but for now a beautiful sunny day ahead with trees just starting to turn. I'm looking forward to riding my old Sizzle down to the park this afternoon.