Send a Thanksgiving Wreath,
courtesy of Fantasy Fights

utumn is the most wonderful time in the world, don’t you agree?

Everything is crisp and chilly and warm, beautiful colors are everywhere.Here in the Shire, we have an annual harvest festival that begins on the last day of September, and ends with a general day of feasting and thanksgiving in late November, just before the first snowfall. In those final days, we celebrate and give thanks for the rich bounty the One has given us. Our farms and gardens and markets are full of ripe, red apples, golden corn, nuts, berries, pumpkins and gourds, and dozens of other wonderful things grown over the summer, to be put away for cold winter months.

This is a time to bake pies and cookies, to taste good, hot meals, and to hold lots of big dinners with family and friends. We celebrate it also in memory of those first Hobbits who settled the Shire, many hundreds of years ago. They brought with them their farming skills and planted their first gardens, enjoying a fine harvest. They shared what they had with all their neighbors, especially those who did not farm. Legend has it also that some of the Big Folk from the North came, bringing succulent roasted meats with them, and it is believed that they have watched over we Little Folk (from a distance) ever since. The Men and Hobbits of Bree have a similar tradition as well.

Thanksgiving became very important to us after the terrible year of 1190 when there had been a bad harvest that summer, and an unusually long, cold winter where the Hobbits suffered greatly. That was also the year that Gandalf the grey first visited the Shire, however, and befriended the Thaine and his two sons, one of who was the famous "Bullroarer" Took. But if things had been bad, the Shire was blessed with a particularly rich harvest the following summer, and so there was much indeed to be thankful for when the autumn harvest was done! Legend has it, too, that this was the first time we Hobbits were treated to Gandalf's famous fireworks.

Of course, many of you have a similar holiday known as Thanksgiving, which is celebrated in different lands at different times of the year. The most famous Thanksgiving is in America, and is all about some men and women in England who wanted to belong to the church of their choice, not the official church of England. So they thought they might try their luck in the new English colonies of the New World, and called themselves “pilgrims” because they were on a pilgrimage to find a place where they could worship the One as they wished. Unlike Hobbits, though, most of them knew nothing about farming or living in the wilderness, so at first they went cold and hungry, and many starved.

Then a young Native American named Squanto introduced himself to the Pilgrims. You see, he had been taken as a slave some time before by a Spanish plunderer, and escaped. With the help of an English sea captain, he made his way to England where he learned a new language and many of the customs, and became quite a popular fellow. But when he finally went back to America, he was many miles away from his own people, and no one knew how to get him home. A local tribe took him in, and there he stayed.

When he met the pilgrims, their astonished leader heard his tale and told him, “Your sufferings were not in vain, my friend, for if it were not for you, we would all have perished. I believe you were sent to us by God.” And so it certainly seemed, for without his knowledge of the English people, or of the land he now lived in and its local folk, he might never have been able to help them. Squanto was so impressed with the wisdom of God that he himself became a Christian.

That fall, the pilgrims and the “Indians” held a huge feast that lasted a solid week, celebrating the harvest and the rich bounty of the new land, and thanking the One for their new friends and their new home. Sadly, not all stories with Indians and foreign settlers were as happy as this one, but such stories are best told elsewhere.

That is why this event is celebrated each year in America as Thanksgiving Day, even by people who had have forgotten the true story.

In the Shire, of course, we never had Pilgrims or Indians, but we have our own history and traditions. For our Thanksgiving week, we spend a great deal of time in preparing food and making last-minute preparations to see that we have a good hoard for the winter. We dry many things so that they can be stored and cooked later on, and they will last for months. Don’t ask how we do it, because it would take much too long to explain, and I fear your people would have trouble grasping such skills. But we do more than work. We play hard, too. Games like darts, pitching pony-shoes, target-shooting, and sack races are very popular, and we have one last bonfire, just as on the first night of the Autumn Festival. On Thanksgiving Day, we eat until we fill up at the corners, and doze in front of the fire. No one washes dishes until the next day, and we start getting ready for winter--which won’t be far away!

Before you go, be sure to enjoy these lovely pictures of autumn around the Shire countryside, for autumn leaves are at their most beautiful now, and very soon they will be gone for the year. Have a happy Thanksgiving, all!

...Daisy