hiidenkonttibeta

This week the restaurant Smarthouse in Oulu Technopolis had a kekri theme week (I don’t know if it is even longer than this week).

It’s rather curious that Amica attempts to celebrate an ancient Finnish pagan festival. They call it “sadonkorjuun kekkerit” (harvest feast) which is essentially correct. They have it on wrong date – according to most sources it should be celebrated around September 29th or November 1st. Not surprisingly they ignore the religious aspects.

This is what Encyclopædia Britannica’s summary says about kekri:

In ancient Finnish religion, a feast day marking the end of the agricultural season and coinciding with the time when cattle were brought in from pasture for the winter.

It originally fell on September 29 but was later moved to November 1, or All Saints’ Day. It was a time when the ancestor spirits visited their former homes and the living held feasts honoring the dead. Usually a family celebration, it was sometimes marked by a communal sacrifice of a sheep.

So they took the name and a commercially utilizable part of the purpose of an old religious festival, picked a new date for it and used the result for making a marketable “theme week” with colourful ads. Does this remind anyone else about some other old religious festival and it’s modern “celebration”?