High-calorie cereal foods were the crops that made settled agricultural communities possible

Published Oct 08, 2025 • Last updated 39 minutes ago • 6 minute read

Wherever humans lived, they grew grain, which was called “corn.“

Here it comes again – the annual harvest feast and accompanying turkey whinge. Unlike the American Thanksgiving, which is tied to a particular historical event, Thanksgiving in Canada coincides with the end of the harvest season. Sure, there are still some crops to come in, but the farmers’ markets, the indicators of local crop availability, are coming to an end. This is a tradition that goes back millenia; a feast held at the one time of the year when food is available in plenty.

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For most of human history, most of our energy has been spent in hunting, gathering or growing food. Spring starvation was a fact of life even into the 19th. century. Autumn, when animals were fat from summer forage and the last, late fall crops were harvested, was the time of surplus. When animals were slaughtered, things like the liver and lights were plentiful and perishable and needed to be eaten immediately. What couldn’t be preserved had to be consumed. Aside from purely practical considerations, it was natural to celebrate the end of a time of hard work driven by the imminent onset of winter.

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Modern North Americans are spoiled for choice. Even for those of us who are boycotting U.S. products there’s a wide range, and a plentiful supply, of available food that we just need to carry home. No planting, herding, hunting or killing is involved, let alone the messy business of dressing out one’s own cow, sheep or turkey. Winter rationing? Not in the age of the grocery store!

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Most people now live in urban areas, with little direct contact with farms and their activities. It might surprise some people to know that the key crop in past times was grain. Yes, there were other important crops, but high-calorie cereal foods were the crops that made settled agricultural communities possible. Wherever humans lived, they grew grain, which was called “corn”. (Because maize was the primary cereal crop of the indigenous North Americans, the Europeans called it “corn”, and the name stuck, at least here.)

The process of harvesting the grain was demanding and more skilled than we might imagine. Until modern machinery the essential tools for harvesting were the sickle, a one-handed tool with a sharp, curved blade, and the scythe, a longer blade on a long handle, wielded with both hands. Cutting with a scythe or sickle required a particular skill if the plants were to be cut cleanly and not simply pushed over. Reapers cut the corn, and were followed by binders, who bound the corn into sheaves tied with wisps of straw. The sheaves would then be stacked together in pairs (“shocked”, pronounced “shooked”) to dry. After several days the shocks (or stooks) would be brought into the barn.

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While the grain dried, clear weather was essential. Rain would not only delay the drying but possibly spoil the grain altogether. Not only might it deteriorate, but it might also become moldy and unfit to eat. (One such mold, ergot, was endemic to rye, and consuming led to nerve problems known as St Vitus Dance. LSD was derived from alkaloids present in ergot.)

Between the hurry of planting, the careful watch over weather and pests during the growing season and the hard work and anxiety of the grain harvest, particularly the drying period, little wonder if our ancestors celebrated the harvest so enthusiastically.

In the process of the harvest, our ancestors – and not too distant ones at that – also took thought for the other side of the agricultural cycle, the planting. This gave rise to the practice of making corn dolls. “Corn” in this usage isn’t maize, but wheat, barley or any other grain. Corn dolls are not the cornhusk dolls of the indigenous North Americans, but a human or other figure constructed from straw with the ears of grain still attached.

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Why make a doll out of grain? The corn doll was not a plaything. For people who believed in the spiritual life of plants, the corn spirit was a real being that lived in the fields and oversaw the growth and health of the plants. But what happens to the corn spirit when the field is harvested? With the grain cut and nothing in the field, the spirit becomes homeless and might wander away. What would happen then to next year’s crop?

The corn doll was a practical solution to this problem. The very last handful of grain to be harvested was set aside and made into a figure called – depending on the region – the Corn Maiden or Bride, the Kern Baby or Kern Dolly or the Carlin, the Hag or the Old Woman. Sometimes it was called the Hare, the Neck, the straw dog, the Harvest Mare or the Lame Goat. It’s always a female or infant figure, or else an animal, and its purpose is to provide a home for the Corn Spirit until the next year’s crop.

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The corn doll was often decorated with ribbons and brought home with music and dancing before being hung up carefully in the house, usually in the kitchen, or sometimes in the barn, where it would stay until replaced by the next year’s corn doll. Even into the 1950s folklorists recorded the customary hanging-up of a corn doll in the kitchen for luck. In some places the corn doll was laid in the field again with the spring planting so that the corn spirit could go back to looking after the crop.

In most of the British traditions the person who makes and brings in the corn doll is usually a young unmarried woman. In one account the last handful of grain is given to “one of the finest girls in the field” and is brought into the village with fiddles and piping.

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In Danzig, Germany the custom was for person who cut the last ears of corn to make them into a doll called the Corn Mother, who was brought home on the last wagon of grain. In Holstein the Corn Mother was the entire last sheaf of grain, dressed in women’s clothes. It (or she), too, was brought home on the last wagon and was thoroughly drenched with water, probably as a rain charm for the future crop.

Sometimes the Corn Mother was made by the oldest married woman in the village. The finest ears were made into a wreath for the prettiest girl in the village to take to the local landowner, while the Corn Mother was laid in the barn to keep the mice from the grain. The presence of easily accessible grain – and a whole sheaf, possibly – might have deterred the mice from the main stocks, at least for a while.

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In other villages the Corn Mother is carried at the top of a pole by two young men, who follow the girl wearing the wreath to the landowner’s house. The landowner hangs up the wreath in his house, and the Corn Mother is set on top of a pile of wood, where she is the centre of the harvest supper and dance.

The early Christian church disapproved of these customs. In Flanders in the 7th century St Eligius told parishioner not to make “vetulas” (little figures of the Old Woman) or set tables for the house-elf. The fact that people continued all of these practices, even into modern times, says a lot for how vital they believed them to be. Or maybe it was just the celebration. In 1867 one harvest celebration was described in the newspapers of the day as “unrestrained riot and excess.”

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While you might be hard-pressed today to find someone who takes the practice of making a corn doll seriously in the same way, it continues, in a diminished way, into modern times. The Heritage Crafts Association in the United Kingdom says that corn doll making is an endangered craft.

Grain doesn’t have as central a part in our harvest celebration as it once had. Modern farmers who reap with combine harvesters are at the mercy of the weather and whatever mysterious force makes grain sprout and grow.

Still, what’s a Thanksgiving dinner without turkey and stuffing, made with bread and seasonings, or maybe even a basket of hot rolls and butter. This year spare a thought for the Corn Maiden, the Corn Mother, the Old Woman or possibly even the Lame Goat for looking after the grain in the field and maybe wish her a safe place to spend the winter before taking up work again next year.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Novelist and Sault Star district correspondent and columnist Elizabeth Creith writes on the lighter side of rural living

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