When we think of harvest festivals, fields and farmers come to mind, and rightly so. I grew up in the city, raised by grandparents who were farmers and who had come from farming families. The city I lived in was the largest in its state, which is very much an agricultural state. It wouldn’t take me even an hour to drive out of the city and onto winding, narrow, hilly roads boarded by swaths of mustard, wheat, corn, tobacco, hay, or soybeans. For my generation in my family, the importance of the harvest and all the work that goes into it hasn’t been lost. The concepts and symbols that we associate with harvests are so familiar to me, but to many in the city I hail from, those concepts are foreign, distant; like something from a story we’ve heard before but whose details we can’t fully recall.

The harvest festivals of Lughnasadh, Lammas, & Lùnastal are nearly upon us. These three holidays, which herald the end of summer and the start of autumn, share many of the same practices and similar histories, but each also has a distinct flavour of their own, shaped by the lands in which they were (and still are) historically practiced.

The first of the harvests is upon us, a day marking the beginning of summer’s end. Celebrated among ancient and modern Celtic druids and pagans, early Christians, and modern-day wiccans and neo-pagans around the world, Lughnasadh, Lúnastal, and Lammas are Quarter-Day Holidays and festivals within pagan calendars. If you’re a witch, pagan, or Celtic-focused historian on the internet, chances are – even if you’re not a pagan, druid, or wiccan yourself – you’ve heard mention of at least one of these holidays. You may have asked yourself, ‘why are there so many names for holidays with such similar, if not identical, customs?’ and ‘are they actually different at all, or are they all just the same holiday with different names?’ Let us explore the individual origins of each of these holidays, perhaps coming to better understand their