Festivus (3 page)
On the official
Seinfeld
DVD, there is a bonus feature about the making of the Festivus episode. In it, the younger Mr. O’Keefe said his father has adjusted to the way the holiday has continued to change as it has spread into the real world. “My father’s reaction to the whole Festivus phenomenon, such as it is,” said the younger Mr. O’Keefe, whose shaggy hair looked soppingly overgelled for his DVD appearance, “was at first he was a little sort of weirded out by it, but evenutally it became: ‘Yes! Vindication!’
“He thought his message was getting out. He was very excited by it.”
Still, the elder Mr. O’Keefe’s earlier trepidation reflects the knowledge gleaned from his studies of the origins of religion—that once these things start spreading, no one knows where they might go.
“Have we,” he wondered when first interviewed about his holiday, “accidentally invented a cult?”
Perhaps.
The holiday has grown like mad in the real world. From a Festivus disc-golf tournament in Oregon, to a living room in Kentucky where a cat with a special “lion cut” hairdo frolics during Festivus, to a Festivus carol sung bawdily at an annual party in Manitoba, to a Festivus wine bottled on a working oil field in Oklahoma, Festivus is a gloriously fertile vine spreading everywhere. Festivus has been embroiled in a free-speech controversy in Florida, a Super Bowl victory in Baltimore, and a tax policy debate in Washington, D.C.
Festivus is just a word, and maybe that is its magic. There is no ruling force, no humans claiming otherworldly authority to dictate its rules and ordain its leaders. Festivus describes whatever it is people want to celebrate. Thanks to its star turn on
Seinfeld,
a few bare-bones rituals have become loosely attached to Festivus, but none of these are sacred. All, as is apparent throughout this book, are malleable, easily discarded in favor of something more suited to the group celebrating Festivus at any particular moment.
Something about a holiday that requires no tinsel, no trees, no dripping wax, no harvest horn o’ plenty, and no flattery resonates more loudly every year. It could be that people are fed up with the commercialism of the holidays, or that there is a great yearning for an all-inclusive secular theme for December gatherings. Or it could be that Festivus is just irresistibly silly. One thing is for sure: Festivus is big. In mid-2005, there were about 118,000 Google hits for Festivus, and by 2008, there were nearly a million. Festivus has grown way beyond
Seinfeld
just as it evolved beyond what it was for the rabble of ancient Rome. It is beyond anything that can be controlled by anyone.
Preparing for the Festivus Party
When Is Festivus?
For many celebrants, Festivus is not observed
instead
of the more traditional December holidays, but
in addition
to them—perhaps as an antidote to them. That’s why December 23, the date for Festivus given on
Seinfeld,
is seen only as a suggestion, one that is usually ignored in favor of dates that aren’t within travel periods for the more back-home holidays. Early December is popular for Festivus celebrations at offices, bars, homes, dark parking lots—anywhere.
But any day of the year can be Festivus. For the extended Kehler family, Festivus comes in July. An aluminum tent pole is erected in the center of an Ontario campground and an Airing of Grievances is held around the fire. “People tell embarrassing stories about themselves,” says Therese Kehler, 40, an editor at the
Edmonton Journal,
“and kids are allowed to air grievances against their parents.”
Even at the height of summer, the delicious darkness of Festivus can flourish. One year, Kehler’s son expressed his disappointment about the time she didn’t take him to a hockey game in which Wayne Gretzky played. Next, a female family member was ridiculed for once being so occupied flipping her hair coquettishly at a construction worker that she walked blindly into a glass door.
Therese Kehler’s brother Bob topped everyone another year with his grievance against his own body, revealing a secret not even his sister had known. “He has three breasts,” Therese says, explaining that she finally understood why she’d never seen her brother with his shirt off. “Three nipples.”
Festivus is anytime, pretty much any way.
The Pole
Festivus Poles can be mighty or meek, as seen in these examples from Florida
A group in Ontario made do with this pole, which literally sucks
This unadorned length of lusterless metal or something that looks like metal is the one totem of Festivus that nearly everyone agrees is essential. “It has a starkness that sets it apart from the pageantry of other winter holidays,” said Patrick Baker, a cryobiologist at Miami University of Ohio. “It’s not telling you better days are ahead or anything else.”
TYPES
Many different types of pole are used. For a party Baker attended in Oxford, Ohio, the host pried a support post from a set of steel shelves to serve as a pole and anchored it in a box filled with dumbbell weights. At financial analyst Mike Osiecki’s annual Festivus in Atlanta, the aluminum fencepost he bought for $10 at a hardware store is suspended by fishing line on his porch so that “people can stare at it or dance around it if they want to.”
The pole is generally metal or looks like it is metal. On the
Seinfeld
Festivus episode, the character Frank Costanza says his pole is aluminum, a substance he praises for its “very high strength-to-weight ratio.” In the real world, Festivus celebrants have used cardboard tubes painted silver, aluminum foil, and heating pipes.
ACQUISITION
Poles are typically purchased at Home Depot, where a 6- to 10-foot custom cut of 2-inch-diameter aluminum electrical conduit thick enough to lever up a tipped-over Winnebago sells for about $20. A quarter-inch-diameter pole that is nearly thin enough to pick shrimp bits from a friend’s teeth across the room goes for under $5. The poles can be found in the plumbing department.
eBay shoppers in December 2004 could find a “Lighted Festivus Pole, not 2B confused w/Christmas Tree” at the “Buy It Now” price of $45. The item was described as: “Hand polished Alum. Pole. Base made from MDF and hand-painted. Avail with blinking bulb or Standard Bulb. Pictures do not show the finish of this item well . . . ”
Rival Amazon.com’s online store featured a “Festivus Brushed Steal Pole Lamp,” which looked a lot like a regular pole lamp. One customer wrote in his review of the item, “This is a pretty good, sturdy yet light enough Festivus pole to adorn your December 23rd holiday, but what’s with the attached lights? I say strip ‘em off.”
Free, pre-owned poles are also abundant. Dumpsters outside building demolitions often hold ample lengths of used conduits, popes, and flagpoles. These items will be free, but while diving in the Dumpster, veterans advise, it is best to avoid touching anything that looks like asbestos or that has hair.
Heading to the closet has been found to solve the pole problem. By removing hanging clothes, the rod becomes available. If it’s made of wood, it can be wrapped in foil. What was once obfuscated under hangers can become the star of the party.
Festivus Poles Incorporated
I
t is not fair to say that the most boring job in the world is manufacturing stairway railings, but let’s just say it is a profession which could benefit from a little goosing up. Festivus is a world-class gooser.
One day, when Tony Leto was sitting around the offices of The Wagner Companies, a railing maker in Milwaukee, he read an article about the spread of Festivus, a holiday which requires straight lengths of aluminum.
“We make straight lengths of aluminum,” Mr. Leto, the executive vice president of sales and marketing, thought. He met with his boss. “I told him,” Mr. Leto recalls, “ ‘We’re not going to make a fortune, but we’re going to have fun and we get a little attention.’”
They bought the domain name festivuspoles.com. Research and development followed. A product emerged. The full-sized model, an unpolished six-foot pole with a snap-together base, was put online in October 2005 for $38. The table-top model, three-feet, sells for $30.
The governer of Wisconsin, Jim Doyle, a
Seinfeld
fan, proudly posed with his Wagner pole that year and donated it to the Wisconsin historical museum in 2006.
Blogs that mentioned Festivus started linking to the Wagner site. The Associated Press wrote about the company’s poles and they appeared on
The Today Show.
“We were getting 25 orders an hour in the days before Festivus,” Mr. Leto says. “And on Festivus Eve, people were paying $200 for next day delivery.”
The company sold over 1,700 poles during the 2006 season and 2,100 in 2007. Working at Wagner is now cool. Mr. Leto wishes his barber Happy Festivus.
“How much fun can there be to the aluminum railing business?” Mr. Leto asks. “This gives us something to laugh about.”
The governor of Wisconsin, Jim Doyle, is almost exactly the same height as his pole.
MOUNTING
If the pole is roughly the same height as the distance between a home’s floor and ceiling, it can simply be wedged between the two. This approach might not set the classiest mood, as exemplified by the experience of Ryan Miles, a strobe-light salesman from Nashville, Tennessee. For three Festivi (the plural of Festivus), Miles, 29, has jammed a pole between the ceiling and floor of the hallway that opens onto the den of his rented house. Of his annual party, he notes, “The guest list includes close friends and fewer and fewer girls attending each year.”
Software consultant James Eigner salutes the pole at a party in Chicago
(It may not only be the pole that dissuades the opposite sex. It could be the beverage of choice, a Festivus invention of Ryan and his friends called “Swill.” It’s made by pouring a case of beer, a fifth of vodka, and three frozen lemonade concentrates into a cooler. “The foam will settle,” Ryan assures.)
There are tidier techniques. An elegant one is filling a large flowerpot with sand and working the pole into the center. Some Festivusers in Texas take the trouble to screw brackets into the floor and ceiling to hold their pole in place. Trevor Hare in Tucson worms his into a one-gallon tub filled with rocks. Unlike Ryan, Trevor exhibits class. When Festivus season passes, he says, “The pole is stored, wrapped in the finest wool, in the garage.”