In rural England, the day in late autumn when the last of the crop is harvested and brought back home is called the harvest-home, a day of celebration and gaiety. The feast held on this day is called the hockey, a puzzling name because its origin is completely unknown and yet it has been commonly used, both on its own and as part of numerous phrases: hockey cart, for example, refers to the last cart of grain brought out of the field, hockey cake refers to a seed-cake eaten during the celebration, and hockey night refers to the nocturnal festivities that traditionally follow the harvest-home. The feast itself, however, is simply called the hockey, a term probably much older than its first appearance in print in the mid sixteenth century; hockey is still used in this sense in England, but in North America the word has been superseded by Thanksgiving, a celebration formalized in the early seventeenth century. The other hockey, the one synonymous with Wayne Gretzky, also emerged in English in the mid sixteenth century as the name of a game played in a field with sticks and a ball or, on ice, with a puck. However, this hockey does not appear to be related to the harvesthome hockey, deriving instead from the word hook, a reference to the players’ hooked sticks.