Autumn leaves and harvest wreaths
The harvest wreath, a ring of grain, fruit or autumn leaves, belongs to the season Thanksgiving grew out of: New England’s yearly thanks for a successful harvest. Wreaths of grain and fruit are old harvest emblems. Rome’s first garland, Pliny says, was a wreath of ears of grain, and in Athens a bough wound with wool and hung with fruit was carried to show that scarcity was over; when the autumn door wreath itself began is not documented.
Meaning
The autumn colours in these wreaths are the colours the leaves take on in the fall. The SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry explains that shorter days and changing temperatures stop a leaf’s food-making, its green chlorophyll breaks down, and the yellow and orange pigments that were there all along show through; other changes form red anthocyanins, and oaks turn mostly brown. The harvest these wreaths recall is the one the season celebrates: the colonial New England Thanksgiving, Pilgrim Hall Museum says, came to be proclaimed each year by the governor in thanks for a successful harvest, and Sarah Josepha Hale called the holiday “the feast of the ingathering of harvest”.
Origin and history
Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, writes that Romulus founded the Arval priesthood, twelve brothers with Romulus himself as the twelfth, and gave them as their highest honour a wreath of ears of grain “tied together with a white fillet”, which he calls the first chaplet ever used at Rome. (The Bostock and Riley translation on the Perseus Digital Library misprints the ears as “years of corn”.) In the Greek world Plutarch describes the eiresione, carried at an Athenian feast in the month of Pyanepsion: “a bough of olive wreathed with wool … and laden with all sorts of fruit-offerings, to signify that scarcity was at an end.” Plutarch ties the feast to Theseus, who paid his vows to Apollo on that day after bringing the Athenian youths safely home.
These are ancient harvest wreaths and garlands, not the direct ancestors of the American door wreath.
See also
Cornucopia, Turkey, Cornucopia, Pumpkin and pumpkin pie, Flint corn (multicoloured corn), Three Sisters.
Sources
- Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, book 18, chapter 2, Translated by John Bostock and H. T. Riley, 1855, Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University
- Plutarch, Life of Theseus, 22, Translated by Bernadotte Perrin, Loeb Classical Library, 1914, LacusCurtius, University of Chicago
- Why Leaves Change Color, Environmental Information Series, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry
- Sarah Josepha Hale, You Are the Historian, Unit 5: Giving Thanks, Plimoth Patuxet Museums
- Evolution of an American Holiday, Thanksgiving & National Day of Mourning, Pilgrim Hall Museum
Browse symbols formed from circles or curves and waves.
Last reviewed September 30, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research