Patterns & Metaphors
Festival
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[Template] Feast days were posted in all the religious and ritualistic calendars of the ancient world. Some were observed privately. Those that were observed publically one could term, festivals. There were also clan, and therefore, community feasts whose participants were numerous enought to designate it a public event. Private feasts involved eating copiously and often of foods reserved or special to the feast day. Harvest feasts featured the produce of the harvest; vintage feast the new wine usually mixed with water. Both harvest and vintage were community events and thus festive occasions; large scale processions, dances and other revelory were characteristic of these festivals. Besides the economic basis to the ritual calendar, i.e. the seasonal, agricultural and animal husbandry cycle of productive activity, there were other occasions for festivity. Some were commemorations of a victory or other historical or legendary event. Some were based on vestiges of star and planet worship, taking from among the solstices and equinoxes and their proximate new or full moons, for example, some of the feasts (or from major planetary aspects, heliacal star risings, etc.). Others, like the Sabbath and the Sabbath meal, provides a humane and necessary break in daily toil. Modern secular nation-states have introduced a number of national holidays with associated festivities in their calendars as religious observances have fallen away (e.g. the first of May).
