Ideas to Celebrate Fall

Linda Florence

The Leader, August/September 1989

Crisp, bright fall. Nature is a riot of colour and ripeness ready to harvest as the earth prepares to rest through the dark months until spring and the beginning of a new cycle of life. For people all over the world, it is a time to celebrate, give thanks, and seek blessings for the year to come.

The festivals of fall include harvest thanksgivings, moon festivals, and new year's celebrations, but you needn't stop there. You can design your own festivals to celebrate the start of a new Scouting year and all the other signs of fall.

Annual Fall Migration

Look around outdoors and notice how birds are flocking together. Listen for the distinctive calls and watch for the V-shaped formations of Canada geese heading south.

Go bird watching or visit a nearby sanctuary. It's an excellent time to observe birds because sparser tree foliage makes them easier to spot and you'll often see them out in the open feeding to prepare themselves for their long flights.

Getting Ready for Winter: It's harvest time for animals, too, and you'll see them scurrying, collecting, and disappearing into burrows to store away nuts and grain for the cold months.

Go on a ramble to watch squirrels, chipmunks, mice, and other creatures getting ready for winter. While you're out, collect nuts, acorns, other seeds, and twigs. Cubs can glue creative combinations to scrap wood to make "My Nutty Six" plaques. Beavers and Cubs can glue them together to make Pet Nuts.

Provide walnut shell halves, glue, and lots of bits and pieces Beavers or Cubs can use to give the shells personalities, then place a marble under each and hold Nut Races.

Instead of apple bobbing, try bobbing for nuts. They don't float like apples, so it's a lot wetter and more fun.

Autumn Leaves

Celebrate the maple leaf. Go out to collect different kinds and colours of maple leaves. Make leaf prints, plaster casts, and rubbings.

Preserve coloured leaves in wax by arranging a selection on wax paper, covering it with another sheet of wax paper, laying on a pad of newspaper, and pressing with a warm iron.

Collect things or pictures of things featuring Canada's maple leaf - our flag, coins, souvenir items, and the like. Go for a little walk in the neighbourhood and count up the number of times you see this symbol.

Learn to sing The Maple Leaf Forever.

Rake up the leaves in the yard around your meeting place, your sponsor's hall, or anywhere your help will be welcome. Before bagging or taking the leaves to a compost, jump into the leaf piles and hold leaf fights.

Go out to find a fallen tree branch to mount in your meeting hall. Give Beavers or Cubs yellow construction paper and red marker pens. Have them cut maple leaf shapes from the construction paper, write on each leaf the name of something for which they are thankful, add a few streaks of red, and tape their leaves to the tree branch.

Fall Fairs: Communities all across Canada celebrate the harvest season with fairs that combine exhibits of prize produce and flowers, food, handicrafts, music, and fun. Some fairs feature competitions in log-sawing, pole climbing, and arm and leg wrestling. Take your group to a day at the fair. Better still, exhibit your crafts, produce, baking, or preserves, and join the contests.

Special Days

The diverse cultural and faith backgrounds of Canadians mean we have so many special days we can celebrate that it is difficult to know what to choose. The best place to start is with the members in your section and the festivals their families celebrate. You'll find a rich selection of things to share and do. Take a look.

Mid-September: Hispanic celebrations mark the national holidays of Mexico and several South American countries. Make and break pinatas and hold a taco feast. Learn some Spanish songs and dances.

Onam:

• The Hindu Rice Festival on September 12 celebrates the harvest and remembers King Bali, who brought peace and prosperity to the people. Around this same time, Canada's Algonkian, Northern Cree, and Ojibwa people also hold a Thanksgiving Festival to start the wild rice harvest.
• Make a decorative plaque from rice grains and dried grasses.
• At camp or on an outing, cook up some curried rice and fruit. In a pot with a tightly fitting lid, mix 250 mL rice, 25 mL butter or margarine, 125 mL raisins, 50 mL chopped dried fruit, 10 mL curry powder, 25 mL dried onion flakes, and 625 mL water. Cover and place on a hot part of the fire or over high flame on a camp stove and bring to a boil. Remove to the edge of the fire or turn down the flame and let simmer for 20 minutes. Say a special thank you grace and enjoy.

Moon Festival.

• Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese people celebrate the moon in fall, perhaps because it stays close to the horizon longer and seems larger at this time of year, and certainly because the light of a big full moon enabled people to work on into the night to finish the harvest before the first frosts came.
• From bright coloured tissue and other paper, tassels, and the like, make simulations of paper lanterns shaped like carp, butterflies, moons, stars, diamonds, or any other things important to you. Hold a lantern parade. Do a Lion Dance.
• Eat moon cakes. Perhaps one of your families will bring some to a meeting for you to taste or give you a recipe to make your own. If not, buy some from a nearby Chinese bakery.

International Day of Peace, September 19

• Make peace cranes (October '88)
• Write a story or poem describing a world of peace.
• Talk about what members think of when they think of peace. Create a peace collage of images and materials.
• Cut coloured paper into strips. Ask members to write a short prayer for or thought about peace on each strip (e.g. God, I want to please you by taking turns with my friends. Help me remember to let others be first). Link the strips into a long paper chain to decorate the meeting place.
• Share prayers for and thoughts about peace from different faiths

Rosh Hashanah, September 30:

• New Year's Day is a solemn and serious occasion for Jews. Remembering the day God created Adam, it is a time to consider one's relationship with God and other people, to wish people well ("May you be inscribed in the Book of Life for a happy year" ), and to hope for a good year ahead.
• Ask members to bring a fruit from home or visit a local market to choose a variety of different fall fruits. At the meeting hall, cut them into pieces and set them out on plates around a bowl of honey. For a year of sweetness, dip fruit pieces in honey and eat.

Thanksgiving: Yom Kippur

• Canada's Thanksgiving feast day on October 9 is also Yom Kippur this year. The Day of Atonement is the most important Jewish holy day of the year and a day of fasting.
• As we give thanks for our bounty, we also think of the many people like us in other parts of the world who do not have all the things we take for granted healthy and plentiful food, clean accessible water, shelter against the weather. A little bewildered about how it can happen in our land of plenty, we also think of fellow Canadians who struggle to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves and their families.
• Perhaps your members will decide to fast until the evening meal on Oct. 9. They can donate the money they save by skipping breakfast and lunch to the Canadian Scout Brotherhood Fund and help Scouts in developing countries with community projects that will make their life better. Or they can donate breakfast and lunch foods (dry cereal, powdered milk, tins of soup) to a local food bank.
• For your meeting closest to Thanksgiving, ask all of your members to bring in something or a symbol of something for which each is particularly thankful. Arrange the offerings in a display and hold a sharing session where everyone says a few words about what he or she has brought and why.

Sukkot

• October 14 begins the joyous seven day Jewish festival of Thanksgiving. To represent the temporary dwellings of the Israelites when they fled Egypt, families often build a sukkah or small shelter outdoors and decorate it with harvest fruits and vegetables and autumn leaves. Many families take as many of their meals as weather permits in the sukkah. Before eating, they may pray:

May it be Your will, Lord my God and God of my forebears, to send your presence to dwell in our midst and to spread over us the sukkah of your peace, to encircle us with the majesty of your pure and holy radiance. Give sufficient bread and water to all who are hungry and thirsty. Give us many days to grow old upon the holy earth, that we may serve you and revere you. Blessed be the Lord forever.

• Your members may want to construct a small sukkah and hang it with berries, corn, seed cakes, and other food for wild birds. Perhaps you can get permission to do this outdoors at your meeting place or at a retirement or nursing home where residents can enjoy watching birds come to feed during winter. Sixes or patrols can take turns to replenish the bird food through winter months.

Fall offers many other special days we haven't mentioned that members in your section may tell you about. Mahatma Ghandi's birthday (Oct. 2), Durga Puja or Navaratri (Oct.7-9), and Diwali or the Festival of Lights (Oct. 29) are important times for Hindus. Moslems celebrate the birth of the prophet Muhammad on Oct. 12. On Oct. 15, Buddhists celebrate Pavarana (the end of the dry season) and Founder's Day to mark the formal introduction of Buddhism to Canada in 1905. On Oct. 20, people of the Baha'i Faith celebrate the birth of the Bab, who heralded the coming of the prophet Baha'u'llah and a new age.

Put the colour and fullness of fall into your programs this year. Use the few sketchy ideas presented here as a basis for a brainstorming session and draw upon your members and their families or local ethnic communities for ways you can count and celebrate all the blessings of the season.