potlatch
pot lach
- n a ceremonial feast held by some Indians of the northwestern coast of North America (as in celebrating a marriage or a new accession) in which the host gives gifts to tribesmen and others to display his superior wealth (sometimes, formerly, to his own impoverishment)
- THE great occasion in the life of a Northwest Indian, before the turn of the century, was the potlatch.
- In that ever-widening circle of giving outside the family, Christmas sometimes takes on an aspect of the potlatch, a ceremony of the Kwakiutl Indians of the Pacific Northwest .
- The correct host stages a kind of alcoholic potlatch, making sure that everyone has a glass and that no glass is permitted to remain empty .