Fall and Harvest Celebrations around the World

How different cultures and religions celebrate the Fall/Harvest season's holidays differently.

This blog post highlights the most popular ways people all over the world celebrate in the months of October and November. These months are full of celebrations of all kinds, some as unique as the region of the world where they originated. Some have been celebrated for thousands of years, others are fairly new- but they are all important for the people that hold them dear.

Cultural differences should not separate us from each other, but rather cultural diversity brings a collective strength that can benefit all of humanity.

~ Robert Alan

It really doesn't matter how you choose to say it – celebrate, celebrar, fira, célébrer, يَحْتَفِلُ, 庆祝, slaviti, fejre, festeggiare, viering – a celebration is understood all over the world and across cultures and religions as an act or event that commemorates something, and in some cases it makes something, or a specific date, special. And while you can see many differences in the events we celebrate, and how we do so, they all have similar aspects of togetherness, reflection, and enjoyment.

Halloween and Thanksgiving are the most popular celebrations throughout the U.S. for this season, but there's many more Fall and Harvest celebrations around. Some are religious in nature; some were inspired by nature itself and the incoming harvest, others honor cultural traditions of the region or country they are celebrated in.

There are a lot of holidays that are culturally significant to their countries of origin, some of which have festivities that have been passed down through the generations, and brought to the US by our ancestors.

Here we show only 13 of the most popular celebrations around the world, all around the months of September, October and November, but there's many more.

1.Halloween: mainly the US and Canada, but also celebrated in different ways all over the world.

2.Samhain: Ireland, precursor to what we call Halloween.

3.Loi Krathong: Thailand

4.Oktoberfest: Germany

5.Hungry Ghost Festival: China

6.Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead): Latin America, especially Mexico.

7.Bon Om Touk: Cambodia

8.Ognissanti: Italy

9.Bonfire Night (Guy Fawkes Day): United Kingdom

10.Diwali: India

11.Mid-Autumn Festival or Moon Festival: China, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia.

12.Thanksgiving: United States, Canada, Grenada, Saint Lucia, Liberia, and unofficially in countries like Brazil and the Philippines. It is also observed in the Dutch town of Leiden and the Australian territory of Norfolk Island. The history of this holiday will be discussed next Thursday on its own post.

13.Yom Kippur: Jewish tradition, observed all over the world.

Stay tuned for more information on the Thanksgiving traditions and history on our next post.

Our area is blessed to be called home by many people of a lot of cultures, with their own traditions and celebrations, and they deserve to be acknowledged.