Hautrage en fête

Party time in our little village of Hautrage. It's the ducasse, the annual feast of the patron saint. I have no idea who that is, because as is often the case here in nominally-but-not-really-Catholic Europe, the party around the saint's day has eclipsed, or even replaced, the religious component. But for what it's worth, the village church is Saint-Sulpice. This is a picture of the tiny carnival that now fills the Grand' Place in yesterday's rain.

And here's one of today's antique tractor expo. Lots of models from 1956 and 1957, which I figure must mean that harvests (or subsidies) were better than normal in 1955 and 1956.

For the serious language geeks, ducasse is a Belgian and northern French usage that is a corruption of the word dedicace, meaning a dedication or consecration.