'Feast'

FEAST, n.  A festival. A religious celebration usually signalized by gluttony and drunkenness, frequently in honor of some holy person distinguished fro abstemiousness.  In the Roman Catholic Church feasts are "movable" and "immovable," but the celebrants are uniformly immovable until they are full.  In the earliest development these entertainments took the form of feasts for the dead; such were held by the Greeks, under the name of Nemeseia, by the Aztecs and Peruvians, as in modern times they are popular with the Chinese; thought it is believed that the ancient dead, like the modern, were light eaters.  Among the many feasts of the Romans was the Novemdiale, which was held, according to Livy, whenever stones fell from heave.