Posted on 12/23/2004 5:48:43 AM PST by KidGlock
Thursday, December 23, 2004
'A Festivus for the rest of us' starts catching on
By ALLEN SALKIN THE NEW YORK TIMES
Gather around the Festivus pole and listen to a tale about a real holiday made fictional and then real again, a tale that touches on philosophy, King Lear, the pool at the Chateau Marmont hotel, a paper bag with a clock inside and, oh yes, a television show about nothing.
The first surprise is that all over the country, many real people are holding parties celebrating Festivus, a holiday most believe was invented on an episode of "Seinfeld" first broadcast the week before Christmas in 1997.
"More and more people are familiar with what Festivus is, and it's growing," said Jennifer Galdes, a Chicago restaurant publicist who organized her first Festivus party three years ago. "This year many more people, when they got the invite, responded with, 'Will there be an airing of the grievances and feats of strength?' "
Those two rituals -- accusing others of being a disappointment and wrestling -- are traditions of Festivus as explained on the show by the character Frank Costanza. On that episode he tells Kramer that he invented the holiday when his children were young and he found himself in a department store tug of war with another Christmas shopper over a doll. "I realized there had to be a better way," Frank says.
So he coined the slogan "A Festivus for the rest of us" and formulated the other rules: The holiday occurs today, features a bare aluminum pole instead of a tree and does not end until the head of the family is wrestled to the floor and pinned.
The actual inventor of Festivus is Dan O'Keefe, 76, whose son Daniel, a writer on "Seinfeld," appropriated a family tradition for the episode. The elder O'Keefe was stunned to hear that the holiday, which he minted in 1966, is catching on. "Have we accidentally invented a cult?" he wondered.
Maybe.
To postulate grandly, the rise of Festivus, a bare-bones affair in which even tinsel is forbidden, may mean that Americans are fed up with the commercialism of the December holidays and are yearning for something simpler. Or it could be that Festivus is the perfect secular theme for an all-inclusive December gathering (even better than Chrismukkah, popularized by the television show "The O.C."). Or maybe, postulating smally, it's just irresistibly silly.
Interpretations of the holiday's rules differ among Festivus fundamentalists. Take the pole. On the show Frank Costanza says it must be aluminum and "it requires no decoration." But he does not specify what should hold it up nor its exact height.
Krista Soroka, 33, the host of an annual Festivus party in Tampa Bay, Fla., sank her 5-footer into a green plastic pot filled with sand this year. "It's just an aluminum pole," she said, "like Frank says."
Aaron Roberts, 28, a zoology graduate student in Oxford, Ohio, unscrewed a post from a set of metal shelves and sank it through the top of a cardboard box with weights inside.
Mike Osiecki, 26, a financial analyst in Atlanta, scheduled his Festivus gathering for friends and colleagues for tomorrow. He said his pole, which he bought for $10 at Home Depot, is suspended by fishing line on his porch, so "people can stare at it or dance around it if they want to."
In Chicago, Galdes anchored her 6-and-a-half-footer in a Christmas tree stand. "This year I am not having a tree," she said.
Scott McLemee, a writer, and his wife, Rita Tehan, had no pole at all at their party in the Dupont Circle neighborhood in Washington. They are two of the Festivus faithful who held their parties early in December before friends headed home for more traditional affairs.
Dan O'Keefe and his son bless the variations. The original Festivus was constantly in flux.
"It was entirely more peculiar than on the show," the younger O'Keefe said from the set of the sitcom "Listen Up," where he is now a writer. There was never a pole, but there were airings of grievances into a tape recorder and wrestling matches between Daniel and his two brothers, among other rites.
"There was a clock in a bag," said O'Keefe, 36, adding that he does not know what it symbolized.
"Most of the Festivi had a theme," he said. "One was, 'Is there a light at the end of the tunnel?' Another was, 'Too easily made glad?' "
His father, a former editor at Reader's Digest, said the first Festivus took place in February 1966, before any of his children were born, as a celebration of the anniversary of his first date with his wife, Deborah. The word "Festivus" just popped into his head, he said from his home in Chappaqua, N.Y.
The holiday evolved during the 1970s, when the elder O'Keefe began doing research for his book "Stolen Lightning" (Vintage 1983), a work of sociology that explores the ways people use cults, astrology and the paranormal as a defense against social pressures.
Festivus, with classic rituals such as familial gatherings, totemic-but-mysterious objects and respect for ancestors, slouched forth from this milieu. "In the background was Durkheim's 'Elementary Forms of Religious Life,' " O'Keefe recalled, "saying that religion is the unconscious projection of the group. And then the U.S. philosopher Josiah Royce: Religion is the worship of the beloved community."
If O'Keefe is the real father of Festivus, Jerry Stiller, the actor who played Frank Costanza, George Costanza's father, is its Santa Claus.
"I'll take that mantle," Stiller said in an interview from poolside at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, where he was awaiting the premiere of "Meet the Fockers," a new film featuring his real son, Ben Stiller. "I'll wear my crown."
Stiller, 77, has his own interpretation of the Festivus rituals as portrayed on the "Seinfeld" episode, especially the feats of strength, which end with a wrestling match between him and George.
"It was another kind of way with dealing with something else that was going on at the time: the rebelliousness of the son against the father and the father trying to prove he was still stronger than the son," he said. "It was like King Lear." (In this case, though, the old man wins.)
Infused as Festivus is with so much potential meaning, it is not far-fetched to imagine it as a permanent part of the American holiday firmament, said Anthony F. Aveni, a professor of astronomy and anthropology at Colgate and the author of "The Book of the Year: A Brief History of Our Seasonal Holidays" (Oxford University Press, 2002). After all, Halloween used to be an obscure festival observed by few, Kwanzaa was invented by an academic in California in the 1960s, and Hanukkah has been reinvented in modern times to include gift-giving. "Even Christmas comes out of a pagan holiday that happened around the solstice," Aveni said.
The holiday does seem to be evolving.
The Festivus party to be given in Austin, Texas, on Christmas Eve eve by Katherine Willis, an actress, and her husband is to include a backyard game of "pitching washers."
"There's basically a hole in the ground," she said. "You try to throw the washers in the hole, and apparently the more you drink the better you get at it."
A Web site she has set up, www.kwillis.com/festivus.html, provides downloads of a feats of strength challenge card, a list of grievances form and Festivus greeting cards, including one that reads, in a Hallmark-like typeface, "You're a disappointment! Happy Festivus!" Another Web site, www.crazygrrl.com, offers Festivus e-mail cards.
Soroka, in Tampa Bay, who has guests write their grievances in a ledger so she can show it at parties all year long, has added karaoke this year.
Some things just grow. "Last year," said Galdes of Chicago, "there was break dancing. I don't know how that happened."
That was actually my favorite episode.
I didn't want to mention it with all the "religious" people on this thread.
The funniest part were when Putty tells Elaine to steal the neighbor's newspaper and she says, "That would be stealing!"
Putty replies, "What do you care? You're going to hell anyway."
Merry Christmas
Putty was a great character.
How about the time he was selling Jerry a new car at discount, until Eileen broke up with him.
He immediately started selling Jerry every two-bit add-onm at a car salesman's disposal: undercoating, warrantees, plain old made-up stuff.
I always thought that Scarface was one of the funniest movies ever made.
And about as effective as telling someone to go "f***k" himelf, and then explaining that you really meant "frisk."
Dan
It definitely has a lot of humorous moments and is intended this way. Good film making I say, to weave dead pan humor into this tale of a cokehead killer. I read the thugy hip hop/rap artists love this film and know all the lines and scenes.
Maybe somebody will be handing out senses of humor for Christmas this year.
Finally! Thank you. It always seemed like one big snickering sneer at the loyal viewers from the people that just knew that they were so above the hoi polloi, IMHO.
Not any more than Kwanzaa which was given a Presidential proclamation of legitimacy!
Seems so odd to me, this leap from noting that someone has a substantive issue with one "joke" — which he explains in plain English — to the conclusion that he must therefore have no sense of humor at all.
Dan
I'll go with my Jewish friends here. It is they who will not spell the name of the Lord. As for biblical justification, try the Ten Commandments.
"This command originally intended to prohibit taking false oaths. More than that, it also forbade disrespect shown to God by using his name wrongly or frivolously. God's name was special. It was the nearest the Israelites came to possessing any part of God, and had to be treated with the utmost care. Later Jewish practice takes this prohibition so seriously that the name of God, and even the word God, was never spoken, with phrases such as "the Lord" and "the Name" used in its place, and G_d used in print." (http://www.hope.edu/academic/religion/bandstra/RTOT/CH3/CH3_2B1.HTM)
"Later Jewish tradition" became the seedbed for a great deal of mischief. I avoid the whole game of "telephone," whether talking with a Jew or a Roman Catholic, by going back to the source. In the Hebrew OT the Name "Yahweh" is used about 6,823 times, all the consonants spelled out as with every other title or name of God.
Not only is it positively not "reverent" to refuse to spell the word "God," it is rather a violation of the many urgings in the Bible to call on His name, swear by His name, take refuge in His name, and the like. There isn't the echo of the shadow of the hint of an example in the pages of God's Word itself for this practice. No prophet is depicted as saying, "Thus says yod-wink-wink-he" (or, to Anglicise it, "Thus says the L-wink-R-D"). Quite the opposite.
Further, being a manmade rule, it devolces quickly into silliness. I note it is not practices with names with theophoric elements. Otherwise, I'd have to be called "Dani-l," or we'd have to speak of the book of "Isai-h."
Like all "improvements" on the Word of God, it isn't. In fact, refusing to obey God's calling on believers to use His name leads the wrong way, and calls attention only to the pecularity of the writer, not the majesty and holiness of God.
Dan
BTW, just to offer an additional thought — the mere fact that someone is Jewish no more makes him an expert on the Torah, than the fact that someone is an American makes him a Constitutional scholar.
Dan
I have zero fear of "Festivus" taking market share from Christmas. The reception that immortal Truth of Christ's birth receives in society will wax and wane with the times, but can never be threatened by something so superficial.
I don't think Festivus is even a poke at Christianity at all. It's a satire on the trappings and cultural traditions of the season.
Merry Christmas to all!
If you think Seinfeld wasn't funny, you have no sense of humor.
Re-program all his pre-set radio stations and see if he changes them back....
Dan.... you are just wrong here. Of course the word "Yahweh" is used in the Old Testament and other holy books. Those works that will be handled with care and respect. The custom is to not write the name on lesser works that will only be thrown away as garbage. If you write the name, that page now should be treated with reverence and kept.
In a sense it is similar to the way we treat American flags different than other pieces of cloth. Once that cloth is a flag, it shouldn't be thrown in the trash.
It has nothing to do with people who are trying to cuss and sneak it by the censors.
You say I'm wrong, yet do not deal with one substantive point I made.
Try that.
Dan
One thing I love about FR....people here can find a reason to bitch about anything.
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