two occasions. They celebrated marriages or ancestors with feasts, but also hosted a feast simply for building and maintaining relationships, which required all guests of the feast to then host their own feast in the near future. Feasts of the Yucatec seemed to have occurred on every social level and all heads of the families had to host feasts at times of rites of passages for their family members in order to maintain the social honor and status of their family. The men plan the feast while the women prepare foods with their other female family members. Each family makes much food to create a giant festival for the community which often include markets, bullfights, fireworks, dancing, and obviously drinking and eating. Rain ceremonies Rain ceremonies are an example of the feasts that the Modern Yucatec Maya host and they demonstrate both the religious and the public parts of feasts. The ceremony takes three days to complete all the ritual activities, with the first two days being confined to a small number of the community members. On the last day of the ritual the public is involved. On the first day, members of the community who ritual specialists construct an altar near the plaza where the ceremony will take place. On day two sacred food is offered to the gods at dawn, noon, three, seven and twice more sometime before two in the morning. Once those sacrifices are over, the people who participated in the ritual eat the sacrificed foods. After all of the very religious activities take place, the public festival is held and is meant to be a time for friends, family and eating. Royal feasts Food was a very important and central aspect of many royal events and activities. For palace sponsored feasts, cooks prepared all of the food while noblewomen supervised the kitchen staff. The Mayas had a strong belief in animatism and LeCount thinks that they may have believed that when Mayan cooks prepared the feasts with maize and ka’kaw, that they were animated by the supernatural. Elite cooking differed from commoners' cooking because of the skills and knowledge that the cooks had which allowed the meals to become sacred or symbolic. Serving vessels At Xunantunich, Belize, archeological evidence of food serving vessels shows a distinction between vessels used at private and public feasts. Different serving platters were found that suggest certain vessels were used