Greetings to Mercian citizens and foreign readers both, today we celebrate the biggest holiday of the Mercian calendar, that of Lúnastal, a festival of good harvest.

Lúnastal is a very special time of the year in Mercia; it harks back to the Celtic culture of the Regional Dominion of Burnham, which existed even before the May 31st Revolution that brought Theodorism to the nation. Lúnastal also has a Christian side, that is peculiarly relevant to our great nation’s history; Lúnastal is also known as Lammas, which commemorates the Feast of St Peter in Chains, when the Apostle Peter was liberated from imprisonment by an Angel of the Lord. The relevance is that, by either sheer coincidence or divine chance, Mercia was originally founded, back in September 2011, under the name of the St Peters’ Republic, at the time a nod to a school that several of the original Mercians were students of, that was sold to an academic trust and privatised. Though few of those original Mercians are active in the politics of the country today, they all contributed great things to our nation’s past.

Lúnastal is, however, historically pagan in nature; before the coming of the Romans and the Christianisation of the Celtic west, Lunastal was the midsummer celebration of first harvests, a time of great celebration. With the coming of Rome and their pantheon, not to mention the Imperial Cult, this tradition was in some ways undermined and suppressed. With the arrival of the Saxons, this festival was celebrated by the quartering of a loaf of bread and placing it into the four corners of a barn to wish for good luck. This practice was carried out in the Lúnastal celebrations of 2013, where Mercian citizens quartered a loaf and placed the quarters into the fringes of the Declan Forest Hundred, when it was then known as a Parish; the 2013 speech and military celebrations themselves were held in Declan Grove, which is soon to become a Estate with its own Landed Nobility.

This year, like last year, bread shall be baked domestically with the intent of eating and quartering, bringing together the ceremony of 2013’s celebration with the community aspect of the Lúnastal celebrations of 2014. Since the ceremony of 2014, Mercia has come forward in leaps and bounds; our victory in the West Germanian Bishops’ War and subsequent annexation of New Israel has allowed us to bury our hatchet with those who were once sworn foes, and that has allowed them to build on to their current status, attempting to become a full Member State of the Würtige Empire. Mercian citizenship has swelled, and that allowed us to hold the first democratic election in our country’s history, a feat that had not been attempted since the failure of the December 2013 General Election in Mercia, when it was a Theodorist Dominion called Burnham. Mercia has helped to inspire a whole new generation of Micronationalists, and has become far more influential in community affairs than it used to be, coming second in a recent Micronational Influence Survey by a comfortable margin.

We do not celebrate Lúnastal alone. In the nations of Leylandiistan & Gurvata, West Germania, Sandus, Nolland and Rudno, celebrations for the midsummer are taking place in a variety of forms, under the intermicronational name of Lammas. The festival has some different names depending on the nation in which celebrations take place; The Irish Confederation of Leylandiistan and Gurvata knows the festival as Lughnasa, and West Germania quietly and piously celebrates under the guise of Lofmasse. This also shows the breadth of faith in our community; Mercia, West Germania, Nolland and Rudno will be expressing Lammas as an explicitly Christian affair, while Leylandiistan approaches the festival as a secular celebration, and Sandus even celebrates the midsummer in the pagan fashion. This has been the largest intermicronational midsummer festival in modern times, with six nations participating, when last year had only three participant nations.

I thank the governments of Leylandiistan & Gurvata, West Germania, Sandus, Nolland and Rudno, as well as the government of Mercia, for allowing their nations to take part in this celebration of harvest, liberty and intermicronational goodwill. Happy Lúnastal and Lammas to you all, God bless and good day.