As the August heat continues to bake the island, a particularly likeable aspect of our tradition continues to dominate our summer days and nights: the traditional village feast. A few days ago, we celebrated the much beloved feast of “Santa Marija” while the past weekend was all rich in feasts with Mgarr, Dingli, Birkirkara and Sliema, among others, all celebrating the feast of their patron saint.

However, it is again sad to report that most of our villages remain mired in senseless pique, especially where there are two band clubs in the same locality. A prime case in point is the hotbed of Ghaxaq, where the external celebrations for the feast of the Assumption of Our Lady were not held this year following a Curia order.

Unfortunately, incidents during external celebrations are not so rare and other parishes had to forego their external celebrations because of similar occurrences in the past.

Rivalry has always been present in our feasts, and this seems to expand rather than diminish. There is also competition with regard to fireworks, as different fireworks factories try to come up with something new just to be better than the others. It is said that competition is healthy, but it seems that everything connected with feasts has to have pique.

The excess drinking and partying in the traditional morning marches has been well documented.

It is a common thing to see young people, men and women, drinking rather heavily during band marches connected with village feasts. Young children are often left unattended by adults who, on these days, are more concentrated on entertaining themselves rather than taking care of the young ones.

Partying is fun, and the village feast should be an occasion to celebrate together. Families are reunited – particularly those who over the years go to live in other towns and villages, if not abroad, and go back to meet old friends during the week of the feast.

But, on the other hand, there is always a limit and it is increasingly being felt that we are losing – some say we have lost – the real meaning behind a village feast.

Last Easter this paper wrote about losing the significance of Easter; even Christmas has become a time of commercial, rather than spiritual, interest. Village feasts have not been spared this either as crowds celebrate in the streets and very few people attend the religious events held in churches in connection with the feast.

The traditional Friday evening marches have been turned into nothing less than a blaring disco with huge speakers being set up in village squares, obviously to the detriment of those residents who wish to have a quiet rest after the march comes to an end.

It has become clear that we are losing the message of the feast as we used to know it in the past. The devotion to the patron saint has been lost and clouded in pique and a licence to let your hair down.

Parish priests and the clergy seem unable to control excess and their words often fall on deaf ears. What used to be a time of reform and prayer has turned into yet another occasion to party. Again, all in the name of the patron saint.

As a nation which has been blessed with all sorts of gifts, not least the Catholic faith which has remained a cornerstone of Maltese society throughout the last millennia, we really should take stock of what the village feast means to us. We must not let century old traditions degenerate into a din of noise, debauchery and pique.

Let us not forget that a feast should mainly focus on the spiritual celebrations, first and foremost. They should not go by the wayside.