Now that we’re in the throes of the holiday season, I’ve been thinking about what it actually means to be festive.
This contemplation started for me a few months ago when I was listening to The Emerald (a must-listen podcast on myth & meaning, btw). Josh Schrei was talking about festivals, wildness, and how earlier cultures created intentional spaces for rupture. It sent me down a little rabbit hole on what “festive” really means.
The word festive comes from festival, which in turn traces back to the Latin festum and festivus.
These words referred to feasts, holy days and occasions set apart from ordinary time. A festival wasn’t just a “holiday party.” It was a pocket of time where regular rules softened or flipped, and people stepped out of their everyday roles into something stranger and more alive.
Going further back, festive is connected to a Proto-Indo-European word for “God.”
In ancient and medieval life, there was much more structure in our shared cultural rhythms, especially around holidays. For most of the year, people lived inside fairly narrow bands of “appropriate” behavior. You knew your role. It was clear what was expected of you. You knew where your body was supposed to be, and what it was supposed to do.
Festivals were the sanctioned rupture. Take Saturnalia in Rome, where social hierarchies inverted and masters served their slaves. Or the Dionysian rites in ancient Greece, with ecstatic dancing and masks and wine. Think of medieval Carnival, when the church calendar itself made room for chaos before Lent’s austerity. Or maybe the Egyptian festivals of drunkenness are more your style, with their mass intoxication and erotic excess, all undertaken to appease the lion goddess Hathor/Sekhmet.
Anthropologists sometimes talk about festivals as “safety valves” for a tightly ordered society. These were the days when you could completely let loose, when the container of normal life intentionally cracked. People drank, feasted, danced, wore costumes, broke taboos. It looked like societal collapse from the outside. Yet somehow, that wild release helped the “default order” hold together the rest of the year.
After the orgiastic peak, after all the shouting and laughing and fighting and f*****g and dancing and crying, people went back to their homes, their fields and their workshops. They may even have been a little relieved to return to structure. The same rules that felt restrictive before might have suddenly felt comforting.
Order was restored. The people (mostly) rejoiced.
I was recently reminded of this older meaning of festivity. Of being in the “festive spirit.” Of “making merry” not as performing consumer obligations but as a regularly-scheduled opportunity to reclaim our collective wildness.
I don’t know about you, but it seems like our holidays and our lives have become a lot less festive in that sense. We pore over gift guides, chase sales, pack our schedules with events and post carefully staged photos.
There are fewer shared rituals where we actually get to let go together. To move, wail, howl, laugh until we’re snotty and red-faced and unpresentable.
Then again, I don’t know your family. You might be doing just fine on the snotty ritual howling front.
What really brought this home for me was a recent ecstatic dance experience on a random Thursday morning. Six of us gathered at a friend’s house to move through some s**t.
The experience, called Excermotive Dance, was inspired by Gabrielle Roth’s 5Rhythms. If you don’t know it, 5Rhythms is a kind of moving meditation that guides you through waves of energy — flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical, stillness — without choreography. Each phase is an invitation to let your body experience and express.
My friend Indira is at least 1/4 fairy, so it should be no surprise that gatherings at her home tend to take on an otherworldly quality. This one was no exception.
From the moment I walked in, something felt different. She approached me with a small bowl of incense and began wafting the smoke around my body. I know I’m pretty weird these days, but I don’t usually feel the “spirit of the incense.” Do you? Anyway, that should have been my first hint.
A profound awkwardness can infiltrate these kinds of gatherings. Many of us are not just awkward moving our bodies, we’re awkward being in our bodies. Suddenly we feel very material, almost icky. Our minds start to race:
What should I do?Was that just cool or cringe?Do I smell?
For some people, the weight of that awkwardness is too much to bear. I get it.
But if you can move through the awkwardness, really blast on past it, maybe with the help of an egg shaker or a drum or a maraca or a tambourine, something shifts. First you are moving your body, maybe rotating in flowing rave-y spirals, experimenting with high and low, erratically folding and unfolding elbows and knees, soaring around the room like a red-tailed hawk. Over time, it’s as if something else is moving through your body. You are being moved.
Over the course of that hour and a half, I came close to what I can only describe as a psychedelic experience. I can’t tell you how many lives I felt myself live, how many times I died, how many times I was reborn. It doesn’t really matter.
Through movement, I was reminded of the wild expression of Presence, that place that’s somehow more real than real. You know what I’m talking about.
At one point, the music reached a chaotic crescendo. The beat fractured into competing harmonies and melodies. It was hard to believe all those sounds had ever belonged to a single song.
Over the din, Indira shouted: “What can you let go of in the chaos?”
By then, I was beyond words. I was back in childlike raw experience, returned to simple being. I answered in a gesture, a coyote-like yip, a shaking off. I shed old skin.
These days, so many of us feel broken by chaos. Lives torn apart. Futures uncertain. “The ground is shifting” is a cliche and an understatement.
I am trying to hold onto hope about the world that might be struggling to be born through all this.
And I’ll tell you, it does feel like labor. Our collective body is clenched and exhausted, mashed by the violence of the contractions it takes to push something new into being. “I can’t do this anymore,” we whimper.
But the strange gift of chaos, the secret of the bacchanalia, is that in the very moments when nothing feels solid, there is also an opening to really unapologetically let go.
I don’t remember those ancient festivals. I don’t know if things were reassembled in exactly the same way once the masks came off. But I imagine that each rift carried the seed of a shift.
So here’s your invitation: this holiday season when things are feeling so tight, so programmed, so fraught, when it seems that there’s no room to move… well, move. Invite some of that original wild festive spirit into your life to see what you can let go of and what in you wants to be broken and remade.
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