The Champion Feast  

The Champion Feast was a yearly fall solstice equinox! I mean equinox! festival that lasted three days. Versions of the festival are indicated in almost all Uzda populations, making it one of the most enduring traditions of the empire.

In the Early Period, the Champion Feast was usually a communal celebration, except for very wealthy households which could afford their own celebration. Despite the poverty and cynicism of the Later Period, the Champion Feast remained hearty, both as an admission of children's enthusiasm for the holdiay and a resignation to the intense commercialization of The Champion Feast by the merchant class.

With the rise of Targhanism in the Last Period, celebrating the Champion Feast became a furtive act of political resistance. Dummy fliers for Loser's Meals would lead participants on elaborate clue-based hunts, in an attempt to throw-off any members of the Embryonic Police who had caught wind of the affair.

The feast itself followed a very rigid format.  On the first day, a giant landscape of The Uzdamalian Empire is built, entirely out of candy. It is traditional that small children are allowed to wash their feet, and then walk to the center of the table to help build the model. Blue sweetrope is used for the Solta River, the old capital city of Uzda is represented with two stacked glazed apples, and Kreyinte is represented by a pyramid of mint chocolate logs. Over the course of the day, the Empire stands as it looked at the dawn of the Early period. (On a nearby table are prepared representational candies for places not established at the beginning of the Early Period.)

At the stroke of midnight, everyone cries, "Time Begins!" ("Khreeshaw Plotno!") Over the course of the second day, history is relived on the table. Each time an event takes place, the children eat the candy involved, and it is replaced with a savory dish for the third day. Again, the replacements are highly scripted: the candy plum fence representing the Targhanian Mountain Range  is replaced by a plum lamb tomato roast, when the re-enactment reaches the building of The Air-Palace of Leontolos.

(Over time, of course, the re-enactments had to be accelerated as more and more history was compressed into a twenty-four hour period. By the Last Period, it had become typical to have a narrator read the history byline in an accelerated auctioneer speech-style, and to walk around jerkily with their elbows and knees at locked angles, as if from the future. )

At midnight at the end of the second day, everybody cries, "All Caught Up!" ("Mooth Plotno!"). The table is then covered and the town retires to bed, having not slept in two days.

At noon on the third day, the table is uncovered. Any items that have spoiled are removed, and the town proceeds to feast on the landscape of sumptuous dishes and drink heavily, generally deteriorating into a raucus street party that lasts till the following morning.

For related information, see:

The Air-Palace of Leontolos

The Embryonic Police

Kreyinte