During the course of recent nights, September’s waxing full moon has been rolling across the heavens—a lustrous silver ball, glowing like a sorcerer’s oracle. The storied Harvest Moon has been beloved by poets, lyricists, and romantically inclined storytellers for decades.
But did you know this familiar and now-waning Harvest Moon is different in a couple of ways from other named full moons?
First off, it doesn’t always come in September. Because it is tied to the full moon that occurs closest to the equinox, it may not arrive until October, depending on how the lunar cycle lines up with the calendar.
Moreover, most of the full moon names you hear bandied about were derived from names traditionally used by the various indigenous people who inhabited North America before the arrival of Europeans.
Their names for the waxing and waning moon cycles were succinct, practical, and eminently phenological: Wolf Moon, Snow Moon, Worm Moon, Pink Moon, Flower Moon, Strawberry Moon, Buck Moon, Sturgeon Moon, Corn Moon, Hunter’s Moon, Beaver Moon.
A moon’s coming and going thus reflected nature’s cycles and the natural world.
Of course, different tribes lived in different regions with different markers and natural indicators of the year and its season’s steady progression. As you might expect, this meant there were many variant Native American full moon names in addition to the familiar dozen given above.
However, the Harvest Moon’s name is not Native American based. Rather it’s a term of purely utilitarian recognition, bestowed by those newly arrived European settlers.
We’re talking pioneers and hardscrabble homesteaders. Rugged folks trying to wrest a tentative living from the savage land…and sometimes just barely eaking out an existence by hunting, foraging, growing, and gathering what they could. With hard work, luck, and sufficient time to prepare, they still often barely managed to accumulate sufficient food to carry them through the cold and windy winter.
Harvesting whatever meager crops they could plant and raise was vital—an added thread to that lifeline tentatively holding them until spring.
But it’s one thing to have fruit and vegetables ripe and ready to pick, and hay and silage ready to cut and get into the dry barn—ensuring you could feed your family and your animals through that coming winter. Getting it saved and ready to store away was another matter entirely.
Harvesting a crop happens at a specific, critical moment. It then takes time and work to accomplish. A cold spell could arrive overnight. Winter might come early. It is always an uncertain race, and it doesn’t help that every day grows a tad shorter.
To work—to harvest—you need to be able to see. You need light!
Nowadays, we take artificial light for granted. Need light? Flip a switch, and you can light up a backyard or a ball field! It’s a modern manmade miracle!
But early pioneers had no such thing as electricity or a portable light. Being able to illuminate a field or even a small kitchen garden was unthinkable! Not with the tallow candles or pine-knot torches that were available. At best these afforded a feeble, flickering light that would barely reveal a shadowy footpath.
My parents both grew up on hill-country farms in areas that lacked electricity. The best they had for a portable light was a coal-oil lamp or a kerosene-burning wick lantern. Your snazzy iPhone’s flashlight app feature produces far more light than either of those sources.
But Mom and Dad also knew firsthand what a beaming Harvest Moon could do to marvelously shine bright and light up a field of corn or hay! They both remember cutting and shocking corn by moonlight, or making fodder—and have told me, too, about how they were also able to manage a final picking and gleaning of the last of the ripe and ready vegetables from their orchards and gardens.
But it was always the field crops that were the most worrisome and highest priority to the early countrymen.
Harvests of grains and grasses often have very narrow timelines. A day or two can make a big difference in natural drying—which ensures their keeping and not molding or otherwise spoiling during the winter months ahead.
Yet, harvest-time weather is also notoriously unpredictable. Storms blow in unexpectedly overnight. Waiting too long to cut and get whatever it is properly stored safely away, can be disastrous if you guess wrong.
Plus, even today, come the end of summer, with its erratic weather and impending seasonal turn, the tasks that need doing around any farm or homestead before things change too much, always seem to multiply exponentially.
There just isn’t ever enough time or daylight to get it all done!
That’s where the Harvest Moon came to the rescue! And this historically important heritage is how and why the Harvest Moon earned its name and reputation.
Some might view the Harvest Moon as bittersweet since it bids goodbye to summer. And in many ways, this celestial crystal ball does foretell of coming change.
Autumn officially arrives in less than a week, as time’s great pendulum continues its receding swing, taking with it another ended season.
The old Harvest Moon will still be visible for a few more nights. Give it a look. It has history, tells a story—often providing a regular and incredibly useful crucial reprieve of much-needed light while adding bonus hours to critically shortened workdays.
In bygone days, when field crops were harvested by hand, what could be more useful to workers rushing to gather in their harvests than a bright light in the night sky illuminating the land?
For rural folks who needed a few more hours—just a bit more working time—the Harvest Moon was purely a godsend. It made a difference in their harried lives…maybe even the deciding factor in their survival.
No wonder it got immortalized with a name.
Shine on, Harvest Moon!
Reach Jim McGuire at [email protected].
