junketing

1. gerundparticiplepresentpresent participle and gerund of junket

plural junketings

1. A celebratory feast or banquet.

   The usual junketings of the times attended the opening of the line.

   1949 September and October, “Notes and News: The Eastbourne Centenary”, in Railway Magazine, page 340

   4 more examples

   Which things though not so substantially performed, are notwithstanding in some measure imitated by Witches and Magicians, I mean in their junketings; whose viands are observed to afford so little satisfaction to nature, that they leave oftentimes the partakers of them as weak and faint almost as if they had eaten nothing […]

   1660, Henry More, An Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness, London: W. Morden, Book 4, Chapter 5, p. 110

   I have already been invited to Two Christenings, and several Junketings, which I hope will be no Reflection upon my Character, having heard, that you your self, Sir, will take a chirping Cup upon Occasion.

   1710, Richard Steele, Joseph Addison, “The Lucubrations of Isaac Bickerstaff Esq”, in The Tatler, volume 5, number 12, London: John Nutt, published 1712, page 62

   […] think o’ them poor women up i’ the villages there, as niver stir a hundred yards from home,—it ’ud be a pity for anybody to buy up their bargains. Lors, it’s as good as a junketing to ’em when they see me wi’ my pack, an’ I shall niver pick up such bargains for ’em again.

   1860, George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, Book 5, Chapter 2

   1928, Virginia Woolf, letter to Vita Sackville-West dated 8 September, 1928, in Nigel Nicholson and Joanne Trautmann (eds.), The Letters of Virginia Woolf, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978, p. 529, You see, dearest Creature, being now in the pink and prime of health, I could sit up all night: we might go to moonlight ruins, café’s, dances, plays, junketings: converse for ever; sleep only while the moon covers herself for an instant with a thin veil […]