Left unchecked, the trend threatens to turn the yearly ritual into a niche affair instead of a shared national experience.
In the West Village that means throngs of drunk and lost revelers crowding the streets and sidewalks, a state of affairs that makes my ritual walk around the block even more complicated.
The three-hour ritual was a nearly all-male affair.
Television watching (through my father's business, my family acquired an early TV with a seven-inch screen) was mostly a weekend family affair, not a nightly ritual with constant noshing.
He also produced the definitive study of a notorious "ritual murder" case of 1840, The Damascus Affair (1997).
But Mr Prendergast cannot conceal his scorn for what, he considers, has become "an altogether shoddier affair, progressively mummified into formal ritual orchestrated by assorted dignitaries" and "media kitsch".
Stripping a woman naked and scouring her private parts with thorns, as a ritual to purify a woman caught in extramarital affairs is one such example.
That hideous degradation ritual is at the heart of the Dreyfus affair; it was meant to be public and demonstrative — this is what happens to faithless Jews.
