Program

Legends & Lore®

Subject

Folklore

Location

123 N Wayne St, Lewistown, PA 17044, USA

Lat/Long

40.598533, -77.577657

Grant Recipient

Community Partnerships RC&D

The Goose Day legend promises that a goose eaten on Michaelmas Day (September 29^th) ensures wealth and prosperity all year round. The people of the Juniata River Valley continue to celebrate Goose Day by dining on geese, raised in small flocks by Amish herders, for the love of tradition and perhaps a bit of luck.

Pope Gelasius declared St. Michaelmas Day a festival in 487, and Michaelmas lived on as a medieval celebration and as one of the days on which landlords collected their tenants’ quarterly rent. Because the holiday coincided with the time of year that wild and graylag geese were at their plumpest, a tradition held that part of a farmer’s dues could be paid in the form of a goose or that the tenant could bestow a goose in addition to his rent to entice the landlord to renew his lease for another year.

Roast goose became the traditional centerpiece of the Michaelmas feast, and it has carried on as a folk tradition and community celebration in the Juniata River Valley, documented since the early twentieth century, where adherents eat goose every September 29^th in hopes of luck and prosperity the rest of the year. There is no longer any religious association as in the days of yore. Michaelmas, in Mifflin and Juinata County, is now simply Goose Day. Since the 1970s, Goose Day has been an official county holiday in Mifflin and Juniata County.