Templar Edification

One of my favorite subgenres of historical holidays is “holidays that tried to replace other holidays and failed.” The Anglican Church, for example, instituted the festival of Harvest Home at the autumnal equinox in order to displace Michaelmas, the Feast of St Michael and All Angels, because they considered the latter to be too Catholic. This effort failed. The people still celebrated Michaelmas on 29 September. But they didn’t reject Harvest Home either. Instead, they simply welcomed both. I consider this a win-win scenario. Growing up in Pennsylvania, Harvest Home wasn’t a huge deal, but our congregation faithfully observed it, and I rather enjoyed that we did. Another example would be Guy Fawkes Night, or Bonfire Night, celebrated in the UK. Initially the Protestant hierarchy suppressed the Allhallowtide (Halloween, All Saints, and All Souls) again because it reeked a bit of Rome. Bonfire Night, on 5 November, commemorated the collapse of the Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament. I...

Thanksgiving is an awkward observance for most clergy, or at least those of a liturgical bent. This is because, quite simply, Thanksgiving is not a Church holiday; it is an affair of state. As such, we do not have a ready-made observance, no rubrics to follow. This leads to an improvised hodgepodge of Thanksgiving Day or Thanksgiving Eve services, some certainly better than others, yet all of them blurring the line betwixt the secular and the sacred. Thus we must take care. Render unto Caesar, and all that. One could approach the story of Thanksgiving from several different angles. School plays often point to the Year of Our Lord 1621, when the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony, both Strangers and Saints, shared a three-day harvest festival with their Wampanoag allies. Historians often point to 1863, the height of the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a Federal holiday commemorating the founding unity of the American nation. But an honest account of its origins, methinks, lies somew...