Harvest Thanks
Harvest Thanks is a week-long national celebration in Palpariel celebrating a successful year of plenty and praising The Abundance. It involves a large-scale prosperity ritual to bless the next season's crops.
The ritual component is more important in rural Palpariel; in the larger cities it's basically Carneval with extra food.
History
While harvest celebrations are almost as aold as time, this specific iteration of it arose with the founding of the Cult of Abundance soon after the Destabilization. It has since become a popular tradition promoting national unity, in addition to a powerful prosperity ritual.
Execution
The celebration typically involves outdoor services in the fields involving much chanting and supplication each morning while it's cool, then feasting and carousing for the rest of the day. The clerics of the Abundance perform the empowered blessing of the crops during the course of the morning services, conducting slightly different rituals each day. One day may involve sprinkling holy water on fields, and another burning offerings of livestock in a bonfire; the liturgy is long and complicated, but only the clerics really need to pay attention. Afternoons and evening often involve games or music, varying by location, which is technically also ritualistic but it's basically just a festival.
The clerics get a day off after the celebration to just relax after a week of being on-duty 24/7.
Components and tools
The main ritual component is food. The highest quality wine, meat, and bread is saved for Harvest Thanks.
Decorations emphasize bounty; sheafs of sorghum are hung from doorways, barrels of wine are rolled outside for display, etc.
Participants
Everyone in the community is 'required' to participate in some fashion, though that mostly means standing in a hot field at worst and mostly partying at best. It's not unusual for morning attendance to drop in the last few days as people get up later (due to the hangovers).
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