Lammas: Remembering the Harvest
As Lammas approaches, I find myself reflecting on the threads that connect harvest, community, and rituals that shape a year.
Lammas, traditionally celebrated on August 1st, is one of the old Celtic cross-quarter festivals, marking the first harvest of grain. The name comes from the Old English hlaf-mas, meaning “loaf mass,” a time when the first bread was baked from newly cut wheat and offered in gratitude. It is a threshold in the wheel of the year: summer begins its turn toward autumn, when abundance was once gathered from the earth by hands and shared in a community.
Lammas feels like remembering. Like coming home to the golden fields of my birth place in the prairie. Recalling the power of this golden light and all the abundance it fruits. It reminds me that the earth is a gathering place for us to be together.
Years ago, back in Kansas, I helped a mentor grow an acre of wheat each summer. It was never just about the grain for me, it was about the beauty of the way this man simply lived his life and it was about the people he kept around his fields. When the wheat ripened, the community would gather to harvest it, moving through the field with scythes in a shared rhythm, while carrying on conversation, laughter, and a sweet sweat that comes from collective work.
There was effort and timeliness in this beauty. We watched the sky closely, aware that the grain needed to be gathered before the birds devoured it or the rain drenched it. That attentiveness to the timing of the land gave the work a sacred focus.
After cutting came threshing and winnowing- dusty, rhythmic and ceremonial work. One friend built a bicycle-powered grinder, utilizing our movement for power to turn the grain into flour. It bridged old practices with playful invention.
What stayed with me most was the way the field brought the community together. When the wheat was ready, we all made the time, taking out days from our busy schedules to do the work to harvest in community.
In recent years, I’ve begun growing wheat again on a smaller scale in the Colorado Rockies and it inspires in me a deep reverence for the cycles of the earth. I plant seeds with my women’s group in the spring, tend them through the seasons, and harvest them with my family. This year I planted Winter Wheat, Utrecht Blue and Rye. These grasses produce golden seed heads woven in radiant blue, black and green sheaths. I save seed each year, carrying it forward as a living continuity of this place.
In late winter when the light shifts toward Imbolc, I’ve been using this wheat to weave Brigid’s crosses with my community. These small woven forms mark the quiet reawakening beneath the surface and bring hope to our hearths.
Beside the sustenance of the grain itself, there is something deeply nourishing in these rituals- embodied reminders that connection lives in soil, through our food, into our hands and in being with each other.
At each turning of the season, I am reminded that we move within a larger spiral of the years. Lammas is, at its heart, about remembering our gratitude for the whole cycle. It is a time to recognize what we receive from the earth and each other and it reminds me to tend these relationships with my hands and my heart.
