Festival life is pretty personally defined. Like most ideas, we can sign up for it, or not. We can determine the extent of our commitment to familial or cultural notions of celebrating a festival life. What is a festival? Many of you know without my saying the obvious. Though, what is it for, how do we take it as our own, and why should we anyways? You may have some resistance to this idea of the festival and, if so, is it the same for all festivals? Or just those with which you grew up? Is it the commercial festival which you reject, or the sacred ones? Do you have your own?
If you want to make festivals part of family life, what are some ways you can do this? I am going to toss out a bunch of ideas, some seminal to the practice of festival life and some simply whimsical. We get to make it up, our very own festival life. But there can also be traditions we have loved so much since childhood that continuing them feels like an embrace, or a salute across the centuries to our people. It is a happy thing to weave festivals tightly in the fabric of our cyclical year and through the developmental stages of our whole long lives. Festival life may be a well worn and loved track through the year for you. But in case you are unsure, here are some thoughts.
Cleaning is often a key preparation fo festival time that builds anticipation. The place of anticipation in festival life, especially for children, is high. Anticipation can often be richer—as it feeds and lives in imagination where nothing can diminish it—than the physical experience of the festival day/s. Cleaning for a festival also lifts our common space into something of reverence. Sweeping the porch and adding a pot of flowers to welcome the grandparents, the angels, the rabbit, good will and beauty. Polishing the dining table helps children feel the specialness of the meal when they sit down at the table they helped to care for and beautify. Part of how we remember, how we get glued to traditions and ideas, is their life in our muscles. If we inhabit the preparation, we prepare in ourselves, in our actions, and in our cells a sacred and receptive place.
Tell the stories from other years, the sacred stories and family stories. Tell stories of the natural world changing. Tell stories of the people who did extraordinary things for others, who essentially saved the day, or a people, or Love. These stories build both the anticipation and those underlying qualities that the festival life inspires: courage, hope, generosity, humility, gratitude, self-sacrifice, wonder, or awe.
Make your beautiful nature tables, festival tables and mealtime tables with the things that grow only now, only here. Bring the flowers that are long traditional symbols of your festival. In my mother’s home it was irises, in my home it is peach blossom branches and Redbud twigs with the leaves growing as the blossoms fade. At school we grow wheatgrass, or marigolds and seasonal herbs, tending to them indoors before planting them outside. Through these acts of care, we become part of the growth of the season. Fill up the house with jars of branches because this moment will pass. Notice it. All of this anticipates but at the same time inwardly prepares. Festival life is more of a time than it is a day. It gets richer the more you give to it.
Wash and press special clothes. Wash hair and feet and polish shoes. Line up all the stuffed animals. Snug up the covers on the bed. All of these seemingly ordinary tasks build the readiness for festival life. You know how keeping the same schedule at home throughout the days helps the children be ready for nap, for snack, for pottying, for outside play? This readiness can also be prepared for festival life. It takes a vision of what you want it to be. You can make a list. Here are a few things on mine outside of usual preparations I’ve shared so far: a new pillowcase for my child that matches the pj’s I made for Christmas, a special dinner (this year, lasagna that my sister and I will make together), iced tea for everyone that has sprigs of something from my garden served in shiny glasses that let the light through. Of course, I will want to read something that day, something that reminds me why I love being a person in the world right now in this place.
But all of that takes so much time, you may think. I am already so busy. Yes. Remember too the joy of having a family so we can share the work of festival time. A nature table or centerpiece which makes such a difference for the festive mood of a room takes a heartbeat and can be done at the same time as the children play or when you collect herbs or greens from the garden or when you need a break from the house or from the kids or you are on your lunch break. Making spaces that are festival-flavoured can happen in little moments throughout the day/s and weeks.
Let’s say you are just beginning your festival preparations, this afternoon. You did not even really think about it, or it seemed a waste of time since families cannot gather. There are all of the hours of the day for making your festival: the children can make watercolor placemats to go under the plates and clip little swags of rosemary to decorate the plates when the table is set. They can help to set the table, and fold the napkins carefully. You can pull out the sacred text, or the sweet children’s picture books that are special to now and read one tonight after dinner. You can sing, or learn the simple version of that song on the guitar, just playing one key at a time, no chords. This can be the beginning time… if it is the beginning. You will grow your festival life as the years go on.
Do festivals extend beyond the day, the week or 12 days of the season? Yes and no. Part of the point of sacred festivals is to give us practice and fuel to enthuse (meaning the breath of God) our whole way of seeing and being in the world. Festivals remind us of the higher ideals of humanity we tend to forget with everyday life. In the days leading up to and during a festival, we steep ourselves in its rich message. It becomes a contained practice in consciousness. We can give it our whole hearts and not take it for granted because it will not come round again for a whole year. Its special gifts and foods and decorations, its songs and stories, get wrapped in their handcrafted cloth, stowed away in the carved trunk and placed with gratitude and reverence into the rafters, a stair step for angels.
Yet, in another way, the festivals live beyond their season. When I was a child, my Lenten practice one year was to do anonymously kind things; another year it was not to gossip. These replay in my head throughout the years when I say unkind things or think them, when I think I need credit for something I do. The practices of festival life help me to work toward a self better, kinder, more humble than the one I am living.
Happy Festivals to all of you.