Festivus (2 page)

(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 played “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.

COLIN
:
The two writer guys said I should just sit next to Elaine. I was supposed to make Elaine uncomfortable. I was not her type. I had a line they didn’t use. As they go around the table, I’m looking at Elaine and I’m drooling at her and I’m like, “You’re a foxy fox.” Before we shot it, Michael Richards said, “You should go up to her and say, ‘You’re foxy,
really
really foxy’ and jump on the table and pull down your pants.” I wasn’t a member of SAG at the time and I was, “Dude, if I was you, maybe, but I’m not going to be rewriting dialogue and stepping on people. I’m just going to do what they tell me and hope the check clears.”

COLIN
:
The magic of Festivus had not yet hit in my mind. In anybody’s mind, really.

what Collin Malone didn’t do

TRACY
:
My first inkling of all of this was when Ben & Jerry’s came out with this Festivus ice cream. I was like, “What the hell is that?”

DANIEL
:
Around Christmastime, people I don’t know, their humorous way of introducing themselves to me is “Happy Festivus.”

*The notes on the official DVD of the episode conflict with portions of Letts’s account. The DVD notes say exterior shots were shot Sunday, November 23rd, with additional shots done the next afternoon, November 24 th, and the rest filmed in front of a live studio audience the following night, November 25th. The first cast reading of the script was on Thursday, November 20th. The onscreen notes also conflict with Malone’s account. The notes claim that Stiller did not mess up the line, which he uttered midway through the Festivus scene during the dinner. But the notes also, confusingly, claim that at one point in the production, Stiller had been scripted to conclude the final scene at the Festivus party, where the wrestling occurs, by saying, “Happy Festivus, Georgie. This is going to hurt you more than . . . I lost my train of thought.”

So Frank coined the slogan “A Festivus for the rest of us!” and formulated other rituals: The holiday occurs on December 23, features a bare aluminum pole instead of a tree, forbids tinsel, and does not end until the head of the family is wrestled to the floor and pinned. The final act of the episode shows a Festivus party at the Costanza house.

Just as the holiday changed for television—most notably with the addition of the pole—the original O’Keefe Festivus in Chappaqua, New York, was constantly in flux. “It was entirely more peculiar than on the show,” the younger Mr. O’Keefe said.