Harvest Festivals Around the World: How Cultures Celebrate Food and Family
As autumn arrives, communities around the globe celebrate the harvest season — a time to give thanks for food, family, and abundance. From Asia to Europe to the Americas, harvest festivals highlight the universal importance of gratitude and togetherness.
What are harvest festivals?
Rooted in ancient agricultural traditions, harvest festivals mark the end of the growing season. They’re an opportunity to share meals, honor ancestors, and celebrate community.
A brief history of harvest celebrations
Across cultures, harvest festivals have always combined food, faith, and family:
- China & Vietnam: The Mid-Autumn Festival celebrates the full moon with mooncakes, lanterns, and family reunions.
- South Korea: Chuseok, or Korean Thanksgiving, honors ancestors with feasts and rituals.
- India: Navratri and Durga Puja combine worship, dance, and communal feasts.
- Germany: Oktoberfest started as a wedding celebration and grew into the world’s biggest folk festival.
- Canada & U.S.: Thanksgiving focuses on gratitude, food, and family gatherings.
How global communities celebrate abroad
Diaspora communities recreate harvest traditions wherever they live — from hosting feasts and dances to sharing foods like mooncakes, tamales, or pumpkin pie. Many also send money back home to help families prepare for celebrations.
Staying connected: Send money worldwide, simply and securely
Wherever your family calls home, Paysend makes it easy to send money directly to bank accounts, cards, or wallets across 100+ countries. With low fees and fast delivery, you can be part of harvest celebrations anywhere in the world.
Celebrating gratitude across borders
Harvest festivals remind us that no matter where we are, food and family connect us all. This season, if you’re sharing support across borders, do it the easy way — with Paysend.
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Here's the short answer: yes, you can use a credit card to get money into someone's bank account abroad. "Credit card to bank transfer" means exactly that — you fund the transfer with your credit card, and your recipient receives it in their bank account. Or on their card, in their wallet, or as cash to collect, depending on where they are.
The card and the bank account do different jobs. Your card pays for the transfer. A provider like Paysend then pays the money out through local systems on the other end. It's one flow, and it takes about a minute in the app.
One thing worth knowing before you start: a credit card is usually the most expensive way to fund a transfer. Some issuers treat it as a cash advance, and credit tends to carry higher payment fees than debit. You'll always see the full cost, exchange rate included, before you confirm anything. What follows is: the ways your money can arrive, what each one costs, how fast it gets there, and the cheaper routes worth checking first.
Every month, thousands of people working in the Czech Republic send part of their payday home — many of them Ukrainians supporting family across the border. And the traditional route makes it harder than it should be: bank wires that ask for IBANs and SWIFT codes, fees that only show up after the money's gone, and days of waiting while someone at home is counting on it.
Pavel Štich has spent years helping his readers solve exactly that. He's Co-Founder and Lead Financial Editor at Moneyo.cz, an independent Czech platform that compares money transfer services, stock brokers, and alternative investments — and a Paysend Ambassador, which means he tests what he recommends, explains it plainly, and brings his readers reader-only perks. We asked him how Moneyo started, who reads it, and why he chose Paysend.
