In 20th Century America, Christmas and New Year along with a super-bowl game, a department store promotion, and a t.v. run of Bogart films are all called "festival." The word is used so loosely we tend to overlook the serious regenerative function of festivals in early civilizations.

Festivals developed to strengthen people's sense of community by ritualizing common experience. The word itself comes to us from two related Latin words, festus, joyful and festum, feast. Some contemporary festivals continue this dual tradition of joyful celebration and feast, offering many venerable traits and haps of our most ancient seasonal holidays.

The universally shared contemporary festivals, Christmas and New Year, have roots in pre-Christian Syria, Persia, Greece and Rome. The very date, December 25th, long had been celebrated as the nativity feast of the Persian sun king, Mithra, when in 275 A.D. Roman Emperor Aurelian established it as the Birthday of the Unconquerable Sun.