Festivals are threshold-events between everydayness and non-everydayness. They mirror the way in which we relate to others and to reality in general, as attested by the main functions performed by festivals. In the essay, such functions are critically examined with reference to Caillois, Bachtin, Pieper, and Gadamer. On the background of the tension (in a real as well as figurative sense) between fratricide and fraternity that characterizes shared life, the essay identifies the specific feature of festivals to lie in the intentional co-presence of four modalities of life, namely: a communitarian dimension, a positive attribution of meaningfulness to the theme of festivals, an autotelic activity, and an expressive form connoted mainly by sensory and bodily elements. Antidote to the degeneration of festivals is a communitarian dimension centered on relational goods; their implementation is capable of regenerating everydayness in cases when a prevalence of instrumental and egocentric relations appears.
