On Gifts and Giving: a festive conversation with the HP

Dear HP,

I was very happy to see your reflections on the nature, the purpose, the cause and the end of feasts and feasting.

It strikes me that the turning marked by feasting is not only of the generations, carried into and out of one another by love.

The years and the seasons, too, are marked by feasting...and also by fasting.

So, what of the cosmic significance of feasting - of the turning of the seasons into and out of one another, through the years and decades and centuries and millennia and aeva?

I mean to say that you almost stumbled on the Feast of All Saints - the fourth feast of the Christian calendar. How is this possible? We have Christmas and Easter (though the seasons of Advent and Lent, which are their respective propaedeutics, are less and less pronounced - with the result that events like the Carnival and the Immaculate Conception are less and less before the public consciousness).

Said shortly: what is the relationship of feasting to fasting, and may we succeed in having the one without the other?

Best,
LD