Moon cakes and mid-autumn harvest festivals: Jewish Sukkoth and Indian Huts

Over breakfast, the morning after my trip to a Toastmasters meeting on the theme of the Moon Festival, we could see the orange lanterns around the swimming pool in Singapore had gone.

However, memories of the mooncake discussions about the moon festival of previous days lingered in our minds. We sat eating Scottish porridge oats, not a Chinese, Malay or Singaporean or Asian porridge savoury, not the Scottish way with salt, but the English way sweetened with sugar. Our own family version features the addition of Canadian maple syrup. The British are famous for their fondness for sweet foods, with a high per capita consumption of sugar and confectionary.

Harvest Festival at School in England
I remember from schooldays in London, England, how we would see the school hall decorated with greenery, and a small mountain of tainted food and fresh food to the right of the hall platform. At one time the food would have been distributed back to the children, so that the poorest families received food, in effect, from the richer families. Nowadays, more often the food is sent to homes for the elderly and poor and to charities for the homeless. To me this was an English tradition, and a Christian tradition.

Sukkos for Sukkot Festival
Later I visited a synagogue in London and saw the sukkos, the autumn harvest festival where a three sided hut is constructed from tree branches and plants. it might be tied with raffia. It is often open fronted with three sides with the fourth sides against or formed by the outside wall of a home. In the nineteen sixties, seventies and eighties, in London, the religious Jews would build a sukkos in their back garden. Non-religious friends might be invited to share the ceremony.

In the late nineteen nineties or the 21st century I was invited to a multi-faith ceremony in a Sukkos built at the back of a Liberal synagogue. The purpose was to share the tradition with increasingly secular families who no longer bothered to build a sucks at home. Also to show the Sukkos to the members of the Methodist church alongside (the church and synagogue often entertaining each others members).

A Sukkos for a private home would be small. In the large communal size Sukkos the colourful fruits hung from the roof which was partly open to the sky. The ceremony included an explanation of the origin of the festival, songs and prayers, and ended with plates of fruits passed around and general conviviality and mingling.

At the end of the festival, the rule is, you must dismantle the construction entirely. A new one must be built each year. (This reminds me of the Seder night, passover, when the spring harvest requires all the old food to be discarded, because it might be infected with the mould causing St Vitus' dance, before the new harvest is brought back to be stored. In the Seder festival you have a new dining set.)

Indian
I was astonished when I went to India to see that huts for the harvest workers were in the middle of the field (guarding the harvest against robbers at night), reminiscent of biblical times in the Far East. Suddenly the Jewish festival, with its construction of a hut from fronds, tacked onto a brick building in a back yard, which had all been a puzzle to me, made perfect sense. it echoed the old days when your food for the next year was brought back from a field where the family or a servant or employee was camped out overnight in a makeshift DIY temporary hut.

As we sat over breakfast, mulling over these harvest festival memories and thoughts, I reflected that these traditions all reflected harvest and autumn festivals.

Singapore
"But Singapore doesn't have autumn, nor four seasons, nor harvests," pointed out a member of my family. "The tradition comes from China."

Maybe the harvest festivals of the Christian, Jewish, Chinese and Indian cultures are not connected. But I used to have trouble remembering whether the Jewish Sukkos and the Chinese moon festival are in the spring or autumn. Now with this mental connection, it's very clear to me and easy to remember.


Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.