Festivus (13 page)
In the flavor graveyard since 2002. Time for a revival?
“We had a flash animation on our Web site where a gingerbread man came out and plugged in a Christmas tree and he got electrocuted and then the branches all fell out and it became a Festivus pole,” says Dave Stever, director of marketing for Ben & Jerry’s. The company produced a Fesstivus-flavor ice cream in 2000 and 2001. The flavor featured broken gingerbread men, brown sugar, and cinnamon.
Charity
WHAT
: Festivus Maximus, concert to benefit Autism Society of Greater Cincinnati, held at Southgate House, Newport, Kentucky, December 18, 2004.
BRAINCHILD OF
: David Storm, musician and father of autistic son.
PLEASE EXPLAIN
: “We are trying to associate autism with something other than Dustin Hoffman and
Rain Man
.”
RAISED
: $2,000.
WHAT
: The Drive for Rebecca, a foundation for children with autism, declared itself “The Unofficial Sponsor of Festivus” in an online appeal.
BRAINCHILD OF
: Jonathan Singer, father of Rebecca.
PLEASE EXPLAIN
: “What does
Festivus
have to do with autism? Absolutely nothing.”
RAISED
: During December 2004, the foundation’s Festivus Web site page garnered 156 hits, but Singer does not know how much of the over $200,000 raised over the drive’s two years is due to Festivus.
WHAT
: Festivus Food and Beverage Gala, Calgary, Alberta, to benefit Children’s Wish Foundation of Canada, November 2004 and 2005.
BRAINCHILD OF
: Mark Kondrat and Bill Robinson, sponsors.
PLEASE EXPLAIN
: “We were going to call it Christmas around the World. We decided a few months beforehand we wanted a catchier name.”
RAISED
: $8,500.
WHAT
: Festivus Pole outside office of University of Texas at Austin’s Student Engineering Council winter 2004 to benefit a family from the Founation of the Homeless.
BRAINCHILD OF
: Tatiana Hinosotis, SEC social chair.
PLEASE EXPLAIN
: “[We put] a pole outside of the office with gift tags decorated with what the family wanted.”
RAISED
: Around $400 in cash and gifts.
WHAT
: Entrance fee to University of Dalhousie Psychology Department End of Exams Festivus Party was a nonperishable food item for the local food pantry.
BRAINCHILD OF
: Sara King, doctoral student.
PLEASE EXPLAIN
: “We usually just get really hammered, that’s pretty much what it is.”
RAISED
: a pretty big pile of soup.
WHAT
: Fifth Annual Festivus Fundraiser to benefit AIDS research, held at the Urban Living Center in Kansas City, MO, April 26, 2008, and featuring costumed thumb-wrestling.
BRAINCHILD OF
: Julianne Donovan, graphic designer
PLEASE EXPLAIN
: “Less talk and more wrestling!”
RAISED
: $500.00
“We were trying to get at the essence of what it would be,” he says.
Not everyone went along with the marketing plan.
In 2000, Joyce Millman railed in
Salon
against the flavor. “Weren’t those ice-cream makers listening when Frank set down the basic tenets of Festivus?” Millman wrote. “Nor commercialism. No frills.
No tinsel.”
The ultimate failure of Festivus ice cream, like the tempests caused by Festivus beer, may have been due to a backlash against the attempt to distill the essence of something undistillable.
Or it may have been that ice-cream aficionados thought the flavor tasted like sawdust and burnt telephones. Whatever the case, the flavor sold out its 65,000-gallon initial run, but not at what Ben & Jerry’s considered a high enough “velocity.” Festivus was sent to the flavor graveyard.
There is a petition at the Web site ipetitions.com asking the company to bring it back. “Few ice cream flavors have approached Ben & Jerry’s Festivus in terms of overall harmonious flavor composition,” the petition notes. Emily Gillespie of Ohio, signatory number 110, added, “I love Festivus! I look for it every Christmas/holiday season!
“Oh, please, please, please!” Juan Carlos Guerrero, number 91, wrote. “Damn you B & J’s, you gave us a taste of paradise, then you rip it away!”
As of spring 2008, there were 120 signatures. Ben & Jerry’s says it has no plans to resurrect Festivus, but the company insists it remains pleased with its whole Festivus experience. “It was successful from a PR standpoint,” Stever says, citing statistics that 120 million people in the United States saw news stories about his company’s Festivus ice cream.
The stomach is not the only vulnerable point at which would-be Festivus exploiters are attacking. There’s also the soul.
Bethany United Methodist Church in Summerville, South Carolina, ran Winter Festivus ‘04 in a local park in an effort to bring young people closer to the fold. Christian rock music was blasted, a large screen showed lyrics like “Everything that has breath praise the Lord,” and hot chocolate and popcorn were served. “The focus was Christ,” says Matt Yon, Bethany’s youth minister.
Why call it Festivus? “We figured the generation of kids would know what it is,” he said. “We’re real intentional. Christ doesn’t call on us to be complacent.”
Yon says the event held four days before Christmas was a success, with students from five local schools participating, and he plans on using the name Festivus in years to come.
Despite the unusual way Yon’s church used Festivus, it is possible to look at that approach as being true to the Roman roots of the holiday—when Festivus sometimes referred to the extraordinary way the lower classes behaved on officially sanctioned religious holidays.
On the theoretical set of Festivus—The Movie
Indeed, not all exploitations need be untrue to Festivus. It could be that the best possible outcome for legions of Festivus fans would be a Festivus movie that would somehow capture the uncapturability of the holiday and present it in a fun way.
Something like the following, perhaps?
Festivus—The Movie
A TREATMENT
by Douglas Salkin and Allen Salkin
It’s the holiday season. We are in a department store. There are decorations everywhere—candy canes, dreidels, Happy Diwali signs—and holiday music is playing. We see a man, RODNEY THOMAS, striding through the store. He is blocked at every turn by people grabbing clothes and toys and toasters and standing in lines. Rodney is dragging his 5-year-old son, Bobby. The boy looks entranced as he passes the line to see Santa. Bobby and his dad are not stopping. They arrive at their destination: the bathroom. But there is a line here, too. As Bobby fights off peeing in his pants, his father rants about the crowds, the prices, the stupidity he sees in the world. Young Bobby hears this and his little heart shrinks as cynicism starts its infection.
Bobby is never able to find joy during the holidays again. As he grows older we see him staring off into space as his sister tears open her presents. He ignores a girl standing under mistletoe when he is 13. And finally we come to the present day. Bobby is arriving at college on his first day of freshman year.
He is repelled by the conformity. The parties are just like high school with more alcohol. At a dorm-wide holiday party, he stops at a small area on a wall where there’s a Happy Kwanzaa sign with a small tusk stapled to it next to an electric menorah stapled to the wall and then a bumper sticker that reads, “Honk if you love Allah!” An African-American female student, someone in a fez, and a guy with curly hair are staring at these displays while behind them two blond-haired dorm mothers are confiding to each other in whispers, “I couldn’t figure out what Muslims call Christmas.” Over the whole display is a banner that reads “Happy Chrismukwandiwallah!”
As everyone is making plans for winter vacation, Bobby is at a loss. He gets in his car and heads west. After a long drive, annoying holiday songs on the radio, he stops at a roadside diner. He meets a young woman, SCARLETT ROBINSON, who is sitting alone in a booth dressed in a Scarlett O’Hara costume. She just ran away from her fiancé at an office holiday costume party. Bobby gives her a ride. At a rest stop they see what looks like a grizzly bear handcuffed to a tetherball pole. It turns out to be a man, FLORIDA LEE, in a bear suit. Florida had been left behind by his old partner, a carnival muscleman who pretended to wrestle a bear. The cuffs cannot be removed from him or the pole, but the pole is dug out and the bear gets in Bobby’s car with the pole still attached.
Eventually, the three stop at a bar in a small town. They enter, and it turns out to be a Festivus party. But the guy who was supposed to bring the pole had failed to show up with one and everyone was depressed. The tetherball pole is a welcome sight. Someone has a hacksaw and frees Florida. Bobby has never seen a holiday party as great as this. They air grievances—Bobby tells the bear his fur smells bad. They wrestle. Scarlett says she’s sick of Scarlett jokes and she hates her fiancé for making her wear that stupid costume. She phones him and tells him so. She kisses Bobby.
Back at school, Bobby starts a Festivus club and the movement grows like crazy. He becomes the King of Festivus. Things are great. Scarlett is the Queen. But as the mainstream gets wind of the holiday, commercialization starts to take hold: TV specials, ice-cream flavors, mentions on
Jeopardy!,
a hit song, a movie, a BOOK.
Bobby becomes disillusioned by all of this. He believes in the inexplicable magic of Festivus. He sees that the world is using it as a fad and will toss Festivus aside like a Cabbage Patch Kid in favor of the next Beanie Baby. He looks for a sign. He stares at a Festivus pole as if it will give him guidance. When nothing happens, he is elated. He knows that the true meaning of Festivus is just this. Nothing.
He goes home to see his family. He proceeds to get ridiculously drunk and wrestles his father to the floor and puts him in a full nelson.
-fin-
No? Well, something like that, anyway.
The War on Festivus
Festivus is being dragged into the ring for the raging public wrestling match over where to draw the line between church and state.
The opening bell sounded December 15, 2004, when the Polk County Commission in Bartow, Florida, did not approve a request to allow religious displays on public property.
That night under the cover of darkness, a renegade group from the First Baptist Church of Bartow placed life-size figures of Mary, Joseph, baby Jesus, and a snowman in a makeshift manger outside the county commission building.
Festivus at the center of a First Amendment controvery in Polk Country,Florida
And then, a few days later, a sign reading “Festivus for the Rest of Us—Donated to Polk County by the Seinfeld Fan Club” was erected next to the manger. No members of the supposed club came forwad to take credit.
Howls of protest went up. “This was big.” says Jason Geary, a reporter who covered the free-speech flap for the
Ledger
of Lakeland. “It seemed to really polarize people.”
Next, 78-year-old Stella Darby put up a sign honoring Zoroaster, an ancient mystic. She allowed a gay rights group to attach their own rainbow-colored sign to hers with the words “All We Want for Christmas Is Equality.”
The commission held more hearings. Television cameras showed up.
Johnnie Byrd, a former speaker of the Florida House and legal counsel for the Bartow church, told the cameras, “It seems like Christmas is on trial here today.”
Commissioner Bob English, who opposed allowing the manger and other displays to stay, said the county should follow President Bush’s example. “[Look at] the White House lawn,” English said. “I don’t think you’ll see a nativity scene.”
The commission passed a compromise measure, creating a temporary free-speech zone for anyone who registered their display with the county. Zoroaster and Jesus stayed. Festivus, unclaimed, came down. In March 2005, the commission approved a permanent free-speech zone in a picnic area next to the county courthouse. Displays are required to feature a prominent disclaimer that they are not financed by public funds or endorsed by the county.