A Last Bite of Harvest

Well into October, and the Harvest Festival season almost over, nonetheless Ann and I still had two to attend today, one Anglican and one Presbyterian.  The first we attended only the service (Ann played the organ), but had to cry off the lunch, while the other we managed both the service and a very well-laden tea table afterwards.  Both were nicely taken;  the Anglican service could I thought have been better attended, but then again, some who might have been in church were busy instead producing the lunch, I suppose.  I liked the service, simple, clear and with a good cross section of hymns that directed us toward a wider perspective than just the local farms and fields.

The Presbyterian service, in a chapel whose normal Sunday attendance is very few, was I think better attended than had been expected, but a Montgomeryshire tea table is more than capable of coping with a few extra mouths (never knowingly under-catered), and there were plenty of sandwiches and cakes still left when people started packing up for home.  It wasn't a short address, but they like a bit of content in chapel, and there was also a singing-band with guitars, which was nice.  What I liked was the enthusiasm of the preacher, and I felt that his choice of text (from I Corinthians 3) was refreshingly different for a Harvest sermon.

Anyway, that's it for another year, I suppose!  We're already practising music for Christmas, of course, let alone All Saints, Remembrance and Advent.  But I do enjoy Harvest, not least because it's a season in its own right - it doesn't happen everywhere on the same day, so the successive services and socials in different churches mean you can get to see, as you travel about the place, quite a few different interpretations of the theme.