Worldbuilding Weekend Prompt #131 - Harvest Festivals
Welcome to the next in an ongoing series of writing prompts in the Worldbuilding community !
I'm aiming to post one of these each Sunday. They aren't a replacement for the excellent daily prompts from @worldbuilding they're just an extra opportunity if you have a writing itch you want to scratch. 😀
Image generated by AI in Wombo.art
The prompt this week is - Harvest Festivals
It is likely that harvest festivals have existed since humans first created settled agriculture. They began as offerings of thanks to whichever gods a tribe or village worshipped for giving them enough of a harvest to see them through the winter. The rituals might have varied, and Halloween seems to have started as a start-of-winter harvest festival where animals were ritually sacrificed and their meat preserved for the winter. Over time, many of the European harvest festivals became Christianised, and with the growth of urbanisation became more distanced from the land. As a child I remember harvest festivals at the rather suburban school I went to, where we were so disconnected from actual farms that most of us bought in cans of beans and corn on the cob from the green grocers.
Tell me about harvest festivals in your sci-fi or fantasy setting ! Have they retained a close connection to the land ? Are they big state organised affairs, or local celebrations ? What kind of rituals or traditions are observed ? Who organises and presides over them ? What produce is offered, and what happens to the offerings after the festival is over ?
Just to add a bit of spice to things, the two entries I most like (and are linked in comments to this post, so I can find them !) that are posted by midnight (GMT) next Saturday will each get a prize of one Hive SBI.
This link will take you to the FAQ where you can read more about Hive SBI - it's a project I thoroughly support because it gives both the donor and winner a steady trickle of passive income paid out in the form of upvotes on posts.
Guidelines
I stole these guidelines straight from @worldbuilding prompts (I hope that's okay !), I couldn't have written them any better myself....
- Prompt replies may be anything! Art, game assets, stories, worldbuilding details, fake wiki entries, maps... whatever you want to create!
- Please ensure you reply to this post with a link to your reply
- Posting in or cross-posting to the Worldbuilding community is highly encouraged
- Use the hashtag #worldbuilding
- Prompt replies can be any length.
- AI images to illustrate your posts are fine, as long as they are credited to whichever software you used to make them
- Posts using AI to create the text are not acceptable; these prompts (and community) are a way to expand and have fun with human imagination, and I firmly believe AI will never be able to replicate the human spark.
Some other neat communities for writing that you might want to check out are:
It can be a lot of fun to mix and match our prompts with some of these other community prompts.
People who have asked to be tagged;
@sherah
If you'd like to be tagged in on these prompts, let me know and I'll happily add you 🙂
I set my first game of my ongoing D&D campaign in a village enjoying a harvest festival! I'll see if I can get a few minutes to write about it here!