We need more festivals
Original Medium Post HERE
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4 steps to increase community joy through regular collective celebration
“A Festivus for the rest of us.”
On Seinfeld, George’s father famously shared the need for a different December festival, but we don’t just need a Festivus in December. We need festivals, and other regular points of community connection, throughout the year.[1]
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Informing our identity
My children and I recently attended an outdoor mass celebrating the Feast of Saints Cosmas and Damian in Cambridge, MA. After mass, we enjoyed an outdoor Italian family-style lunch and the children followed the tradition of pinning dollars to the saint statue.
A Feast-goer helps my children pin dollar bills to the statues of St. Cosmas and Damian in Somerville.
This was part of a weekend of celebration, featuring everything from amusement rides to fried dough covered in butter and cinnamon-sugar to SNAP! performing their 1992 international chart topper “Rhythm is a Dancer”.
At the mass, we not only participated in these traditions, but also learned more about the ancestral story I was adopted into: part of our identity. We learned these saints from third century Syria became the patron saints of my mother’s ancestral hometown: Gaeta, Italy, more than a millennium later, when prayers to them protected Gaeta from a cholera plague that struck the surrounding region.
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Festivals not only connect people with shared ancestries, but also connect people with shared community. Town days and local festivals like Eastie Pride Day foster our sense of local identify and connection.
Fostering that sense of identity helps strengthen our sense of being part of something bigger, something enduring. . .
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Festivals support our sense of purpose
Festivals contribute to our sense of purpose by instilling shared community values. Years of festivals and family parties have instilled in me values of: family and relationships from my family’s emphasis on attending; sacrifice from watching the people who proudly march for miles carrying statues of these saints and wearing a specific uniform whether hot or cold, rain or shine; and faith from the stories of the saints.
These values cross many cultures. Festivals help make those values more personal; they help us make the values our own. At family parties in England and Scotland, I have formed another part of my identity, being part of loud late celebrations with mincemeat pies at Christmastime or cheese on toast all year long, always with ample beer, wine and whisky. There too, as people take a full week at the holidays to be with family and friends, I have seen that value of family relationships.
Festivals don’t just reinforce the value of relationships. Additionally . . .
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Festivals support strong relationships
Friendships are more likely to emerge as the proportion of time having fun together increases. Good friendships emerge after about 140 hours together. Think about that: it takes 70–140 weeks of weekly festivals, churchgoing, or Zumba to hit those hours! This is why it becomes tougher to build new friendships in time-constrained middle adulthood, as Billy Baker highlighted in We Need to Hang Out.
Paul Rudd’s Peter Klaven feels very awkward calling his new friend Jason Segel’s Sydney Fife in I Love you Man.
Peter Klaven feels very awkward calling his potential new friend Sydney Fife in “I Love you, Man”.
When people are getting to know each other, reaching out to new potential friends can be awkward. The reacher-outer doesn’t want to bother the reacher-outee or to be rejected. Both might worry if there will be enough to talk about and if the other person will like them. (Fear not: they probably will.)
People want strong relationships, but the work of forming them alone can be a scary uphill climb.
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Festivals change that, making relationship-building “the downhill path” (easier alternative). Festivals make it more likely we all will show up, because at festivals: we build and internalize a social expectation of attendance; we don’t have expectations with one new person, but rather connect with a variety of people; and we can “set and forget” a schedule rather than having to schedule each individual meetup.
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I want more festivals. What can we do?
· Make festivals easy to organize. Cities including Boston provide microgrants to support block parties. Festival organizers can make organizing easier on themselves too. Rather than have a catered community Olympics, they can host a BYOB bocce tournament — and keep it going with the same design features, week after week.
· Support third places. Good weather is not guaranteed, so we need indoor and outdoor gathering places. Government can support janitorial, utility, and related costs to keep third places in nonprofits, schools, and churches open. There is a place for technology to support the connection between festival organizers and community spaces too.
· Create more, and more varied, festivals. East Boston is a festival-rich community, with ZUMIX summer concerts at Piers Park, Eastie Pride Day, Piers Park Sailing Center kayaking nights, NOAH kayaking days, Veronica Robles Cultural Center’s Viva Mexico Festival, Sacred Heart community meals, and a variety of cultural and religious festivals. Even with all these festivals and more, little East Boston has room for many more. A diverse array of gatherings can engage more people with content that interests them.
· Promote festivals in-person, online, with flyers, so people know about, and can attend, festivals.
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Your festival opportunity, this Sunday
On Sunday, September 29, from 11–2, East Boston Social Centers does our part, hosting our Joy:us gala at East Boston’s Tall Ship. People from across our programs, community members, staff, supporters, and you will gather for a fun, inclusive, inspiring day with delicious food from local food trucks, everything from face painting to multicultural tables to music, and a celebration of former City Councilor, and East Boston Social Centers alum, Sal LaMattina.
This coincides with Good Neighbor Day: a statewide celebration recognizing that when we gather, we can overcome the loneliness epidemic together.
I will see you at the festival, or I will see you on another time. Stay joyful, East Boston!
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Please share, subscribe, and join our movement by emailing me or supporting East Boston Social Centers. Look out each week for our posts about boosting joy the only way we can: in community. And join us in celebrating Joy:us on September 29.
[1] I like the word “festival” so I will use “festival” to refer to a much broader set of community gatherings in this post.