movable feast

movable feast

An event or occurrence that does not happen on a predictable schedule. Since Easter does not fall on the same calendar date each year, it's often called a movable feast.
See also: feast, movable
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

movable feast

 
1. Lit. a religious holiday that is on a different date from year to year. Easter is the best known movable feast.
2. Fig. a meal that is served in motion or with different portions of the meal served at different locations. (Jocular or a complete misunderstanding of {1} but in wide use.) We enjoyed a real movable feast on the train from Washington to Maimi.
See also: feast, movable
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs.

a movable feast

If an event is a movable feast, it can happen at different times or in different places. Held about 29 May, the festival was a movable feast. Working parents wish to spend time with their children after they get home, so bedtime has become a movable feast. Note: This expression originally referred to religious holidays that are always celebrated at about the same time of year, but not always on exactly the same day.
See also: feast, movable
Collins COBUILD Idioms Dictionary, 3rd ed.

a movable feast

an event which takes place at no regular time.
In a religious context a movable feast is a feast day (especially Easter Day and the other Christian holy days whose dates are related to it) which does not occur on the same calendar date each year.
See also: feast, movable
Farlex Partner Idioms Dictionary
See also:
  • be like ships in the night
  • be like ships that pass in the night
  • be ships that pass in the night
  • not for a second
  • not for a minute
  • not for a moment
  • aint
  • ain't
  • not for a instant
  • not for a/one minute/moment/second/instant
References in periodicals archive
In A Movable Feast, Kenneth E Kiple takes his readers on a journey through time and space to visit the wide range of plants and animals that have fed the human race and have themselves become transformed in the process.
A Movable Feast: The Millennia of Food Globalization
His eighty-fifth birthday last May was a movable feast, celebrated in New York City, San Francisco.
A Revival in Full Swing
His bicycle was his video camera's constant dolly as well as the wheels transporting him and his movable feast - on his back a rucksack of his own design contained a portable gas stove, cooking utensils, and food.
Where are we going? And what are we doing? Rirkrit Tiravanija's art of living
The term "heartlands" seems to be a movable feast and can be defined as anywhere that Plaid can jump on a local bandwagon.
Well used spectre; COMMENT DEBATE & YOUR LETTERS TO THE NATIONAL NEWSPAPER OF WALES
Written by Bechis, Gigi Rival Reviewed at Turin Film Festival (A Movable Feast), Nov.
The Smile of the Leader/Il Sorriso Del Capo
"The company will be a movable feast," Mr Young said.
'Welsh-speakers have 'Welsh-speakers have but they don't tend to go to the opera house' A new Welsh language opera company will be launched tomorrow. Karen Price speaks to the husband-and-wife team behind the project
Special-needs children from County Durham's Movable Feast Arts Group were able to calm growing tensions between unions and Government ministers, performing a song before business started.
Outbreak of harmony
Many of you will have wondered why Easter should be a movable feast (rather like my supper, which depends upon the mood and whim of the Dragon Lady).
Willy Poole column
It looks pretty much a movable feast and it's also, clearly, a massive ego trip.
Keeping memory alive in dances
4 Movable feasts begin with the portable Frykat charcoal grill ($59.95) in sunny Florida colors.
Summer soirees
Easter was the most important feast of the Christian Church and its place in the calendar determined the position of the rest of the church's movable feasts. Because its timing depended on both the Moon's phases and the vernal equinox, ecclesiastical authorities had to seek some way of reconciling lunar and solar calendars.
Letter: Mailbag - Why Easter's when it is
The sea of green stretches for 34 weeks, give or take certain movable feasts. And it's a good time to find our way along the road of discipleship.
You talkin' to me?
In pushing the spatial envelope to extremes, the architect may not have created the most restful of houses - the machinery and spatially movable feasts are entertaining but somewhat disconcerting.
Rising to the occasion
Oldenburg's "Store," for example, was an 80-by-10-foot storefront room with a rotating stock, so its movable feasts were meant to be site-specific - more needful of their certain context than is much of the later, colossal, aggressively site-unspecific public sculpture.
Claes Oldenburg in retrospect: old softies