A movable feast
- according to this article - “is a celebration on the liturgical calendar that changes its date from year to year, but occurs on the same day of the week. The term movable feast has been in use since the early 1400s, and primarily refers to Easter Sunday and the other liturgical days associated with Easter, such as Ash Wednesday and Pentecost Sunday. The memoir A Movable Feast, written by Ernest Hemingway, was published in 1964 and popularized the use of the expression as an idiom. There is little agreement as to what the idiom a movable feast actually means. One definition of a movable feast is of something that changes over time. Another definition is something that nourishes your soul, but is transitory. Yet a third definition is something special that one stumbles across. The term movable feast is also sometimes used in a humorous manner to mean a picnic or a progressive dinner. The plural form of movable feast is movable feasts.”
“In November 1956, Hemingway recovered two small steamer trunks that he had stored in March 1928 in the basement of the Hotel Ritz Paris. The trunks contained notebooks he had filled during the 1920s. Hemingway’s friend and biographer A. E. Hotchner, who was with him in Paris in 1956, later recounted the occasion of Hemingway’s recovery of the trunks and notebooks:
In 1956, Ernest and I were having lunch at the Ritz in Paris with Charles Ritz, the hotel’s chairman, when Charley asked if Ernest was aware that a trunk of his was in the basement storage room, left there in 1930. Ernest did not remember storing the trunk but he did recall that in the 1920s Louis Vuitton had made a special trunk for him. Ernest had wondered what had become of it. Charley had the trunk brought up to his office, and after lunch Ernest opened it. It was filled with a ragtag collection of clothes, menus, receipts, memos, hunting and fishing paraphernalia, skiing equipment, racing forms, correspondence and, on the bottom, something that elicited a joyful reaction from Ernest: ‘The notebooks! So that’s where they were! Enfin!’ There were two stacks of lined notebooks like the ones used by schoolchildren in Paris when he lived there in the ’20s. Ernest had filled them with his careful handwriting while sitting in his favorite café, nursing a café crème. The notebooks described the places, the people, the events of his penurious life.
Hotchner, A. E. (2009-07-19). “Don’t Touch ‘A Moveable Feast’”. The New York Times. Retrieved 2015-12-08.” Wikipedia