Festivus Read online

  Portions of text in this book appeared in different form in “Fooey to the World, Festivus Has Come” by Allen Salkin. Copyright © 2004 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted with permission.

  Copyright © 2005, 2008 by Allen Salkin

  Foreword copyright © 2005 by Jerry Stiller

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Grand Central Publishing

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  First eBook Edition: October 2008

  Grand Central Publishing is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The Grand Central Publishing name and logo is a trademark of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  ISBN: 978-0-446-54591-4

  Cover design by Brigid Pearson

  Contents

  Foreword

  Author’s Note

  SECTION 1: The History of Festivus

  SECTION 2: Preparing for the Festivus Party

  SECTION 3: The Foods and Drinks of Festivus

  SECTION 4: At the Festivus Party

  SECTION 5: The Songs of Festivus

  SECTION 6: Beyond the Festivus Party

  Acknowlegements

  About the Author

  For Jay and Toby, true jokesters

  Foreword

  BY JERRY STILLER

  In the ancient days when gods played their own games, and had their own celebrations, tossing lightning bolts between mountaintops, hurling great boulders—Festivus came out of that. It’s a holiday that celebrates being alive at a time when it was hard to be alive.

  There was no Christ yet, no Yahweh, no Buddha. There were great ruins and raw nature. But there was a kindling spark of hope among men. They celebrated that great thunderous storms hadn’t enveloped them in the past year, that landslides hadn’t destroyed them. They made wishes that their crops would grow in the fields, that they’d have food the next year and the wild animals wouldn’t attack and eat them.

  There’s something pure about Festivus, something primal, raw in the hearts of humans.

  And then there is the idea of an aluminum pole, the centerpiece of the modern celebration of Festivus. Airplanes are made out of aluminum to take you through life from one place to another—in one piece, usually. Aluminum is a type of metal that can say so much if something is done to it, like turning it into an airplane.

  But there’s nothing to an aluminum pole. It has no feeling. It says, “I am what I am.” You endow the aluminum pole with whatever you want to. It leaves you open to explore your own meaning. It is lightweight stuff, but in the form of an airplane it gets you from one part of the world to the next. Remember that.

  And one more thing on aluminum. You don’t want to put too many m‘s into it. “Aluminum” is easy to say, but don’t think too much before you say it out loud. If you think too much about how you say it before you say it, you’ll screw it up.

  So with these sparks of godly and individual human imagination flying, I say this: A Festivus miracle to me would be not having to give anybody a gift during the time of year we call “the holidays,” and not feeling like I’ve shortchanged anyone or hurt their feelings. The other end of the miracle would be that if I didn’t get a gift from someone I expected it from, I wouldn’t think, “Why didn’t they remember me?” Nope. Just wipe the slate clean.

  I mean, most of the time when you get a gift, you have to prove to the gift-giver how much you loved what they gave you. It takes a toll on you. I receive letters sometimes from people describing every little thing about the gifts I’ve sent to them. I don’t even remember what I sent! These people should have more in their lives.

  Which brings me to wrestling, another centerpiece of Festivus, the feats of strength. Wrestling is raw, primal. With my own son, I used to tumble around. He always used to come out on top for some reason. He was very agile. I let him win, of course.

  Snails are primal, too. It’s no coincidence there is a snail called Festivus. The snail is the ocean. Earth, wind, fire, water, the essential elements. For Festivus, make it: earth, wind, fire, and snails.

  That’s why if I’m to air my grievances here, I say: Let’s cut this holidays thing. Let’s cut it down to the bare minimum.

  I am not alone in feeling this way, but very few people will actually say it out loud. Then these things like Festivus come along. Something that makes its way onto a sketch on Seinfeld or Saturday Night Live or another show like that, it comes out of something that’s in the air. It resonates and people run with it.

  For some people the revelation comes too late that life is best kept to the essentials. Some people are given their last rites and that person might say in their last breath, “I should have celebrated Festivus.”

  Look, I’m not trying to be an anticonsumer Jerry the Curmudgeon here. I’m a Gucci man, a Prada man, myself. I buy gifts from these stores. People have a right to purchase things if they want to.

  All I’m saying is, if you celebrate Festivus, you may live a little longer.

  You are getting back to the essentials, to the days of gods on mountaintops and howling wolves. Because you are saying the holidays are in the heart, a celebration of being alive with our fellow humans. For that purpose, an aluminum pole will do just as well as anything else—as long as it’s not stuck in the wrong place.

  Author’s Note:

  Everything in this book is 100 percent true. This is all real.

  SECTION 1

  The History Of Festivus

  Most Festivus-friendly people believe the holiday was born December 18,1997, the day the Festivus episode of Seinfeld was first broadcast. Those people are wrong.

  Seinfeld, undeniably, presented this unfamiliar holiday in a seductively bitter light.

  The TV version of Festivus featured a bare aluminum pole in the place of honor many families reserve for a tinsel-draped Christmas tree, an “Airing of Grievances” in which friends, family, and acquaintances accused one another of being a disappointment, and “Feats of Strength,” requiring that the holiday not end until the head of the household was wrestled to the floor and pinned.

  Millions of people loved it—or at least snickered at the holiday with dark pleasure. Within days of that first airing, some early adopters began celebrating their own versions of Festivus, buying poles at Home Depot, wrestling one another, and airing grievances.

  Something about the holiday’s anti-cheer was delivering an antidote to the tinselly, tee-hee tyranny of forced joviality that rules the modern holidays. Festivus felt right.

  But despite what most Seinfeld watchers believed, this was not the first time Festivus had felt right to people. In various forms through the millennia, humans have celebrated holidays called Festivus. A version flourished in ancient Rome. It morphed through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and manifested strangely in nineteenth-century California before flowering again in upstate New York in the 1960s. What’s amazing is that through its many incarnations, Festivus has always uniquely managed to express the spirit of its age just as it does now. No one has ever owned it. It is populist. It adapts. Uncontrolled by any ruling power, Festivus just grows.

  Some Festivus-lovers may have a hard time believing that the holiday for the rest of us predates the twentieth century. One hopes these philistines are aware there was civilized life prior to television.

  If so, let’s briefly (this history lesson will end soon—but history can be fun. Think of those movies with revealing togas, indiscriminate conquering, a
nd celebratory swigging from wineskins. This is like that.) travel back to the third century BCE when the Roman comic poet Plautus used the word “Festivus” to refer to wild celebrations attended by common folk. Brian A. Krostenko, an associate professor of classics at the University of Notre Dame, has studied the meaning of Festivus in the ancient world and found that even then it was something that evolved to fit its times.

  Plautus, an original Festivus observer

  Ancient Festivi

  by Brian A. Krostenko, author of Cicero, Catullus, and the Language of Social Performance (University of Chicago Press, 2001)

  Humans have celebrated “Festivus” for at least twenty-two centuries. In ancient Rome, festivus originally meant “pertaining to a festal day, a religious celebration.” The word shows up in various forms according to the grammatical rules of Latin: festivo, festivom, and many others. For example, in the poet Plautus’s Miles Gloriosus (“Braggart Soldier”), one character says, “Nunc qua adsedistis caussa in festivo loco” (“Now—to come to the reason why you’ve gathered here in this festal place”).

  For most of the year Roman society was hierarchical and restrictive, but on religious holidays—dies festi—people of all classes were allowed to gather and express frivolity. From this sprung uses like festiuom facinus, “a jolly trick” or “an impish prank” (Plautus, Peonulus [”Little Carthaginian”]), and the use of festivus as a term of endearment meaning the kind of “agreeable” one can be after a day of wine and song.

  The mid—second century was a time of vast social change in the Roman republic. The social elite began throwing dinner parties like the ones they imagined the ancient Greeks had enjoyed. Festivus adapted, gaining a satirical spin. Thus in the (alas, fragmentary) Menippean Satires of M. Terentius Varrio:

  omnes videmur nobis esse belli festivi, saperdae

  cum simus saproi

  We are jolly and jovial,

  so we think.

  Though in fact

  we stink,

  like fetid fish.

  (The saperda was a nasty fish.) The lines parody the self-importance and would-be elegance of dinner table wits. The orator Cicero refers to a festivum acroama, “a delightful diversion” (In Verrem [”Against Verres”]), referring ironically to Verres’s habit of making off with something valuable of his host’s when he left a party.

  As Christianity pervaded the empire, festivus referred not only to dinner parties and rituals in churches but also to merriments associated with pagan feast days. This ensured the continuation of the word into the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and beyond. From festus was derived the Vulgar Latin festa, the source of Spanish fiesta and Old French feste. This was borrowed into Middle English in the form feast (and continued to develop in French itself, becoming fête). The Latin festivus and festivitas became the French festif and festivité, which in turn were borrowed into Middle English as festive and festivity.

  Festivus lives.

  Festivus continued to repercuss through the ages. In 1844 the word’s irrepressible hold on the human subconscious manifested itself in the brain of marine biologist Richard Brinsley Hinds, who had just discovered a carnivorous sea snail off the coast of Southern California. He dubbed the snail “Festivus.” The biologist is dead and no one knows why he used that name, but it was likely inspired by the creature’s party-like shell, a spectacular mélange of ribbons, spikes, crests, and bulbous lumps decorated with brown stripes and flared ridges. Like Festivus’s modern metamorphosis as a sharp-witted holiday, the snail has a bite—and a knack for survival. The 40- to 50- millimeter-long crustacean survives by using its razor-sharp “radula” to bore through the shells of other mollusks. “It then inserts its proboscis into the hole and sucks the other creature out and into its digestive system,” says Lindsey Groves, a malacologist at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. The Festivus snail spends its dozen-year life span in shallow coastal waters off Southern California and Baja.

  “They leave a slime,” Groves says. “That’s how others of the same species find each other.”

  Even as a proboscis-slinging bottom-feeder, Festivus has proven irresistible. “The reason we chose it for the name of our publication, which started in 1970, was it had a double meaning,” says Carole Hertz, cofounder of The Festivus, a scholarly journal published by the San Diego Shell Club (recent headline: “Northern Range Extension for Nuttallia nuttallii”). “It was not only the name of a species in this area but it also sounded festive.”

  The Festivus snail

  Clearly, at the late midpoint of the twentieth century, Festivus was not merely surviving as an obscure Latin root. It was percolating, ready to be served full and steaming unto the world again. The opportunity came in 1966, when a New York intellectual named Daniel O’Keefe, who had an interest in pagan rituals and magic, was casting about for a name for a holiday to commemorate the anniversary of his first date with his wife. O’Keefe, 76 when interviewed in 2004, says the word “Festivus” just popped into his head. But with his ongoing research of ancient celebrations, it is likely the Roman use of the word was swimming around in his mind, ready to be reborn when the right occasion came calling.

  As children were born into the O’Keefe household, Festivus continued to be celebrated there through the 1970s, evolving into more than the celebration of an anniversary. It gained unorthodox rituals. “There was a clock in a bag,” said O’Keefe’s son, also named Daniel O’Keefe, adding that he does not know what it symbolized. “Most of the Festivi had a theme,” he continued. “One was, ‘Is there a light at the end of the tunnel?’ Another was, Too easily made glad?’”

  As always, Festivus had arrived without dogma, a vessel that accepted what was poured into it from the hearts of the mortals who summoned it. The elder O’Keefe poured in a thick brew of the philosophy that eventually flowered into his book Stolen Lightning: The Social Theory of Magic (Vintage, 1983). “In the background was Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life,” he recalled, “saying that religion is the unconscious projection of the group. And then the American philosopher Josiah Royce: Religion is the worship of the beloved community.”

  In other words, Festivus for the O’Keefes strived to be an expression of what was happening organically within the family’s brains—not something that they were told by outside forces should be happening inside them.

  There was no pole, but there were Airings of Grievances into a tape recorder and wrestling matches between the younger Daniel and his two brothers.

  The younger Daniel grew up and became a writer on Seinfeld. There he appropriated and adapted the family holiday for a subplot of episode #166 (officially titled “The Strike” because of a plot involving the character Kramer’s work stoppage against a bagel shop). O’Keefe the younger was the story editor on what has since become known by fans and the Festivus faithful as “The Festivus Episode.” He wrote the script along with Alec Berg and Jeff Schaffer.

  For Seinfeld, Festivus again showed it is something that can be adapted to fit anything—even the requirements of a show about nothing. On the sitcom, the character Frank Costanza 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 for a doll. “I realized there had to be a better way,” Frank recounts.

  The mythological birth of Festivus

  A Maculate Conception: Three Bit Players Discuss the creation of the Seinfeld Festivus Episode

  Tracy Letts is a playwright who won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for August: Osage County, a play about family battles spanning generations of unhappiness and unfulfilled dreams. On Seinfeld, he played “Counterguy,” a clerk at the off-track betting office where Elaine goes to explain she’s been using their telephone number as a fake (to get rid of unwanted suitors).

  Colin Malone shot to prominence in the mid-1990s in Los Angeles for his cable-access television show Colin’s Sleazy Friends, in which he interviewed porn stars. On Seinfeld, he pl
ayed “The Sleazy Guy,” who worked behind the OTB counter assisting Counterguy. His two lines were “Elaine Benes!” and “I’m a man.”

  Daniel von Bargen has appeared in dozens of films and television shows, often playing a cop gone bad. He played Kruger, George Constanza’s boss.

  COLIN MALONE: A Seinfeld casting director saw Colin’s Sleazy Friends, called me in, and gave me a part. If you’re know as the guy who did the porno show, it’s sort of a weird thing. But it got me in Festivus.

  TRACY LETTS: The weird thing about this business is you do all these things that mean so much to you and then you work for five days on a television show and that’s the thing people latch on to. People are always asking me about Seinfeld. I mean, Jesus, it was five days’ work. Anyway, there was no studio audience that week. It was Thanksgiving week we were shooting.*

  COLIN: I was leaving for the day after I did the scene at the racetrack and these two writers who were fans of my show said, “Oh, Kramer has to bring Colin with him to the Festivus party.” It ment I had to work the rest of the day and it went very late and I ended up making thousands and thousands more dollars.

  DANIEL: It was at the end of the week and sitting around that table as the last setup of the day, everyone was tired and had been working hard. Everybody was in a giddy mood.

  TRACY: They definitely had their sh—down. They were all really talented people. This was the last season. They all knew how this stuff worked very well. Jerry Stiller is just the funniest guy I’ve seen in my life.

  COLIN: Jerry Stiller was supposed to say Kruger couldn’t do whatever his job was at all. He just kept messing it up. Everyone stared laughing. It was the only television show I was ever on that no one cared. They were just laughing. They cut out a whole sequence of him yelling at Kruger saying what a horrible person he was.

  DANIEL: My memory of those things is not what you like. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that episode. I’m not big on watching myself.