feast
- Also called:
- festival
- Related Topics:
- New Year festival
- Jewish festivals
- Yule
- Adae
- procession
feast, day or period of time set aside to commemorate, ritually celebrate or reenact, or anticipate events or seasons—agricultural, religious, or sociocultural—that give meaning and cohesiveness to an individual and to the religious, political, or socioeconomic community. Because such days or periods generally originated in religious celebrations or ritual commemorations that usually included sacred community meals, they are called feasts or festivals. The terms feast and festival usually—though not always in modern times—involve eating or drinking or both in connection with a specific kind of rite: passage rites, death rites, sacrificial rites, seasonal observances, commemorative observances, and rites celebrating the ...(100 of 6170 words)