Word: saturnalia
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...only true celebrants of the original Christmas spirit, which we have tended to lose sight of in recent centuries. Check out the holiday's history: Dec. 25 wasn't chosen because it was the date on Jesus' birth certificate but because that was the time of the ancient Saturnalia, when all of Rome poured into the streets for days of public revelry. Even Christianity couldn't take the urge for orgies out of Christmas. In Europe's Middle Ages, the holiday was celebrated by troops of costumed people going door to door, dancing in the streets, drinking to excess...
...Sese Seko has imposed an uneasy unity on nearly 250 tribes strung across an expanse of Central Africa the size of Western Europe. The natural richness of this region and the willingness of Western governments to bankroll his regime have enabled Zaire's President to indulge in an uninterrupted saturnalia of misrule and kleptomania. He has squandered his country's wealth, ravaged its resources and impoverished its citizens--all while adroitly managing to remain untouched by the consequences of his abusive stewardship. Until now, that...
...taste of the collapsed '80s star system has galvanized the "new" Whitney, under its new director David A. Ross, into a veritable transport of social concern. This Biennial, assembled by a team of curators under the supervision of Elisabeth Sussman, is not a survey but a theme show. A saturnalia of political correctness, a long-winded immersion course in marginality -- the only cultural condition, as far as its reborn curators are concerned, that matters in the '90s. The aesthetic quality (that repressive, icky word again!) is for the most part feeble. The level of grievance and moral rhetoric, however...
EXHIBIT C: Tyrone Hayes' flamboyant outfit would have been well suited to the rock-'n'-ready atmosphere of New York's Danceteria. Sporting a Prince coif and pointy, sparkling shoes, the crowning jewel of Hayes' snazzy saturnalia was a pair of unlinked handcuffs, which he wore as arm bracelets...
Although the Church intended only to retain pagan forms, it had a difficult time restraining the pagan spirit. Despite clerical protests and papal anathemas, Christmas in the early days preserved many of the worst orgies, debaucheries and indecencies of the Bacchanalia and Saturnalia. The clergy itself was whirled into the vortex, instituting a Feast of Fools so that "the folly which is natural to and born with us might exhale . . . once a year...