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."
And then, when anyone tries to talk about how wretched it is to lie or steal, you can say, "Hey, lighten up; it started on a a comedy show!
Oh, and anyway, they already did those themes, didn't they?
Your Holiness - please don't forget to use the /sanctimonius mewing close tag and kindly ignore my Festivus invitation.
thank you..!
What point?
Now, you presume to lecture them on what their biblical beliefs should be.
I hope you are getting a beam extractor for Christmas; it will help with that vision problem you've been having.
Dan
It is hardly my fault that you mis-read me, nor that you evidently have no sustantive response.
I tried to engage you on a factual level, ealing with openly available evidence. You don't feel up to it, that's your affair.
Dan
There's always Curb Your Enthusiasm. Maybe we can get Dan to comment on the inappropriateness of having Larry David eat the Holy Family cookies. Or "save" a person being baptised from drowning.
SD
True...forgot about Curb....of course, he Larry IS the character.
BTTT
You wrote; "To me, "G-d" is the abbreviation of a well-known blasphemy."
I wrote: "Your initial claim was that G_d was a shorthand blasphemy. It is in fact a way for Jewish people to avoid what they consider blasphemy."
If you consider that to be a mis-reading of your comment, then the fault does indeed lie with your communication skills, for I cannot see any other way to interpret you.
My "substantive response" was not refuted by you. You instead went off on a tangent about how the Jews are wrong, in your opinion, to avoid the casual use of the Lord in their writing. What that had to do with your assuming that "G_d is abbreviation of a well-known blasphemy", when it clearly isn't, I have no idea.
Thanks for laying that out.
Did I say that Jews were blaspheming? No. I did say that g-d is a well-known abbreviate for a blasphemy. Do you really not know that abbreviation? People even say it out loud.
One more time, to use that well-known abbreviation for a blashpemy, and say "Oh, no, when I use it, you have to take out your decoder-ring so you can know how holy I am! I'm so holy, I do'nt even spell out GeeDee's name!" -- makes as much sense as telling someone to "f**k himself," and then explain that you really meant he should "fork himself."
Otherwise, yes, I did fully answer you. As you've not responded to the substance, there's no real need for more.
Dan
What you said was that G_d was a blasphemy at best and "an attempt to be holier than God Himself by manmade, self-referential ostentations" at worst. Since your self-declared best case scenario declares its usage as a blasphemy, maybe you are implying that Jews blaspheme, but I will instead assume that you totally forgot about the consciously respectful way in which G_d is used.
Do I know that it is also used as an abbreviation for blasphemy? Yes, but unlike you, that usage isn't the first that springs to my mind, as the FAR more common usage I encounter is the respectful usage by religious Jews.
One more time, to use that well-known abbreviation for a blashpemy, and say "Oh, no, when I use it, you have to take out your decoder-ring so you can know how holy I am! I'm so holy, I do'nt even spell out GeeDee's name!"
The avoidance of the casual use of the Lord's name is not to show off one's own holiness, but to show respect for that of God's. On the other hand, lecturing people on the theme of a party they hold because you consider it not Christian enough for the season, that is pure sanctimony.
Written by a writer who is one brick shy of a load in his gene pool. IDIOTS TO THE NTH DEGREE.
I'm the grinch who thinks STeinfeld is idiotic and same for Festivus.
I find it interesting that the author is able to track down and interview so many people across the country that celebrate Festivus.
When did I say anything other than in the context of the Torah itself?
It is hardly "sanctimonious" to agree with God.
Dan
You're right, I used too many asterisks! I clarified it in the next use.
Dan
It is hardly "sanctimonious" to agree with God.
I must have missed the part of the Torah where the Lord speaks of Festivus, and how it is inappropriate to have a party in late winter devoted to anything other than the birth of Christ.
I defer to your deeper gnosticism. How lucky the Rabbis must feel to have such a scholar in the world to explain the context of the Torah to them and how they are in error about the proper uses of the name of the Lord.
I humbly beseech your forgiveness for ever thinking you were being sanctimonious.
Were you and I talking about Festivus? I thought we were talking solely about the topic that started at post 86.
Otherwise, if you ever feel up to talking about the facts (as I've been doing) rather than spinning the ad hominems, let me know.
So far, nothing I've said has even been touched.
Dan
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