Definition of "festal"

His wife had decorated it all up with hollyhocks and poison ivy, and it looked real festal and bowery.

1905, O. Henry, Telemachus, Friend

They were, at any rate in their inception, genuinely religious or genuinely social and festal; and from either point of view they were far better than the secrecy of private indulgence which characterizes our modern world in these matters.

1920, Edward Carpenter, Pagan and Christian Creeds, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., published 1921, page 188

Amidst this fetor the Burmese masses live their festal and contemplative existences.

1952, Norman Lewis, Golden Earth

Athanasius of Alexandria’s thirty-ninth Festal Letter remains one of the most significant documents in the history of the Christian Bible. Athanasius wrote the letter, which contains the first extant list of precisely the twenty-seven books of the current New Testament canon, in 367 C.E., during the final decade of his life.

2010 January, David Brakke, “A New Fragment of Athanasius’s Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter: Heresy, Apocrypha, and the Canon”, in Harvard Theological Review, volume CIII, № 1, page 47