Happy Thanksgiving! If you live in the USA, you're most likely getting ready to celebrate a Thanksgiving supper with friends and family this Thursday. (Canadians, of course, already celebrated a national Thanksgiving holiday in October.) But t hough Thanksgiving may seem like a purely North American observance, it has its roots in ancient European harvest traditions as well as religious rites that go back to the Protestant Reformation. T he Puritans even brought their own blend of solemn prayers of thanksgiving and harvest feasts to the New World w hen they sailed to America on the Mayflower . "Crying the Neck," is a British harvest festival tradition that's thousands of years old and was revived in the 20th century. It involves cutting the last stock or "neck" of grain, marking the end of the harvest. (Wikimedia Commons) English harvest festivals date back thousands of years and many of the customs that started in antiquity are st
. . . where the past is mirrored in the present