There are long holiday weekends every year that the farmer worries about until they are over. It’s a good thing that they are a half a year apart so farmers don’t get too stressed out!
In the spring most people look forward to the May 24 long weekend to open up the cottage, take a spring holiday or at least take the kids to visit their grandparents.

On the farm, the Victoria Day weekend is when the farmers are working extra long days getting the fields tilled and crops planted between rains.
If a tillage machine or planter breaks down from Thursday to the following Tuesday on a long weekend, parts will not arrive to let the farmer do repairs or get planting again unless he carries a large stock of parts in his own shop or can “MacGyver” a piece to let him get back in the field until the new repair piece arrives. If parts are not ordered before noon on Thursday, they will not arrive until a day or two after the long holiday weekend. Many farmers with large equipment can plant 100 acres every day and every day late planting can cost a farmer thousands of dollars in lost crop yield.
Thanksgiving weekend was started centuries ago to celebrate an abundant year and a successful harvest. It is a time when we decorate the interior of our churches with pumpkins, homemade jams, pickles, crab apples, garden vegetables, apples, sheaves of grain, corn stalks and coloured leaves.
It’s the time of the year when hard working church ladies put on those gut busting harvest suppers. It’s also the last trip up to the cottage when the leaves are so beautifully coloured.
For farmers it is the time they are trying to get crops off before that heavy fall rain or early wet snow shuts down the harvest forcing a wait for the fields to dry up, that wet, sticky first snow melts off the corn or maybe till next spring if the weather doesn’t change. Again, the farmer prays that the harvest machinery will not break during that Thanksgiving long weekend. If he is trying to beat the weather, he may miss the church supper, Thanksgiving dinner and may not even see the inside of that beautifully decorated church, waiting to give thanks until next Sunday.
It’s during these madly busy times when a farmer gets that cell phone call about three o’clock in the afternoon and his wife asks “What about supper?” that the farmer realizes that his wife is a true partner in the farm. She knows that he will not quit for supper at five or even at ten at night as long as nothing breaks down. She calls at three because the kids get home from school about four and she knows that it will be her and the kids doing the evening milking, cleaning the barn, feeding all the animals and bedding the cattle before taking a meal out to her husband in the field.
To a man out in the field, seeding grain in the spring or combining on Thanksgiving weekend, seeing the lights of that pickup enter the field at 9:30 p.m. with his wife bringing fresh made sandwiches, homemade cookies and a thermos of hot coffee is the most beautiful sight that he has seen all day. If it is on a weekend and one of the kids can stay with him until he is finished in the field, it is more rewarding than a whole weekend away.
If he gets that crop planted early in the spring and the crop off before that dirty weather in fall, the whole family can enjoy some time together and the wife and kids can call the shot on, “What about supper?”

Chris Judd is a farmer in Clarendon on land that has been in his family for generations. gladcrest@gmail.com