With Autumn upon us all and the harvest moon having come and gone, the only thing left to do is celebrate the Harvest with a good festival and this week there are festivals all over the UK celebrating the bounty of a good year. While very few residents actually participate in farming activities now, everyone can take this time to reflect on their hard work and the results from it as well as making vows on how to make next year even better. For any harvest celebration, sky lanterns are an excellent fit by providing a fun and safe backdrop for the harvest festivals occurring around the UK as we speak.

Regardless of if your harvest festival celebration plans are religious or secular in nature, sky lanterns can be used as part of the celebration. Many simply see the harvest festival as a time for reflection and planning and sky lanterns offer a tool to do both of these. Watching Chinese Hanging Lanterns float up and away is an excellent focal point for reflection and the paper medium is perfect for writing plans for the future on, to be launched into the air, as was historically done by the cultures that first used these lanterns.

One of the traditional uses of sky lanterns is to send prayers and hopes for the future into the sky, written directly on the paper media each sky lantern provides. This practice dates back to ancient China and continues today, including many countries having mass launches of lanterns around festivals of the year. In Thailand, their biggest group launch of sky lanterns is done during their new year’s festival but even smaller festivals end up having large sky lantern launches as well. For residents of the UK though, any time is good for launching sky lanterns, assuming the infamous weather here cooperates. Harvest festivals are an excellent time to do launches though because the weather is more likely to cooperate, the sun begins setting earlier and with the festival atmosphere extending into the evening, everyone involved will be able to enjoy floating lanterns as they pass by earlier in the evening.

For those who will be attending festivals near water, adding water lanterns to the sky lantern launches can really make for a fun and unique experience; one which will be etched into the memories of the attendees for years to come. The beauty and elegance of sky lanterns combined with lanterns floating in the water is one that cannot be matched and one that everyone deserves to see. As part of any harvest festival, it would be a great way to relax and reflect on the past year as well as start forming plans for how to work harder to better reap the rewards available for the next year. For people of all religions, this is a time of the year where virtually all of them share in a common experience because the Harvest time of the year has historically been one of such strong significance that it literally shapes cultures around it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 28th, 2010 at 4:37 PM and is filed under General News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.