Traditions and Festivities
Every tradition is an ancestral bond that connects the generations. When the written word did not yet exist, the symbolic dimension of a festival held a social value that often bound the economic and the religious together in a single reality. Today, millennia after the invention of writing, traditions (and with them celebrations and festivities) are remnants of a past that has in many cases been forgotten and even become unknown, whose symbolic rites seem like decorative masks of a frivolous and empty identity. Dozens of festivities survive in our calendar whose pagan or astrological origins we are unaware of, and whose meaning, so dear to our ancestors, is now too remote in time for us to grasp its relevance.
Traditional festivities have undoubtedly been transformed into commercial events, faithful to the mythology of consumption that characterizes our time. They represent, then, a way of explaining how the world works.