...the festival represents both the cyclic nature of time passing, and whatever specifics a particular society had chosen to use as markers to end or start a new season. today christmas and easter are the only remnants of the pre-modern festival that we tend to celebrate in the western world, and these have taken on very protestant qualities. in fact protestantism isn’t so much antithetical to the festival as it is actively hostile towards any form of fun. so the festivals are no longer the corporeal, bacchanalian orgies of excess that we imagine they once were, and which so many modern theorists and artists have longed for.