If culture were a living body, festivals are its beating heart.

The greatness of a culture can be found in its festivals.

To experience and live out a harmony with the world, in a manner quite different from that of everyday life — this, we have said, is the meaning of "festival." But no more intense harmony with the world can be thought of than that of "Praise of God," the worship of the Creator of this world. Now, as I have often experienced, this statement is often received with a mixture of discomfort and various other feelings, but its truth cannot be denied. The most festive festival that can be celebrated is religious worship or "cult," and there is no festival that does not get its life from such worship or does not actually derive its origin from this. There is no worship "without the gods," whether it be mardi gras or a wedding.

The Happiness Index of a culture can be judged by its festivals

Weddings are festivals between festivals

Festivals celebrate the human race, in how we’ve conquered the Earth, the Skies and the Waters, and most importantly, our own collective vices.

Every day should be a festival.

I find that the more serious a festival, the more they try to find some deeper symbolic meaning into everything.

Let us now pose the question again: is recourse to the "human" really enough to preserve and firmly ground the reality of leisure? I intend to show that such recourse to mere Humanism is not enough.
It could be said that the heart of leisure consists in "festival." In festival, or celebration, all three conceptual elements come together as one: the relaxation, the effortlessness, the ascendancy of "being at leisure" […] over mere function.

Within the world of total work, the "festival" is either "a break from work" (and thus only there for the sake of work), or it is a more intensive celebration of the principles of work itself (as in the "Labor Days," and thus belongs, again, to the working world). There will naturally be "games" — like the Roman circences — but who would dignify the amusements for the masses with the name of "festival"?

There will also be an effervescence of shows intended to show the country's rich heritage, along with spectacular light shows, Andalusian music festivals, parades, and a grand historical tableau brought to life by 400 young dancers.

Art was part of the life of the people, through singing, dancing.

Let festivals be a time when we all come together as one, equal in our shared humanity.

Leisure lives on affirmation. It […] includes within itself a celebratory, approving, lingering gaze of the inner eye on the reality of creation.
The highest form of affirmation is the festival; and according to Karl Kerenyi, the historian of religion, to festival belong "peace, intensity of life, and contemplation all at once." The holding of a festival means: an affirmation of the basic meaning of the world, and an agreement with it, and in fact it means to live out and fulfil one's inclusion in the world, in an extraordinary manner, different from the everyday.
The festival is the origin of leisure, its inmost and ever-central source. And this festive character is what makes leisure not only "effortless" but the very opposite of effort or toil.