Festivus (4 page)
NOT MOUNTING
For their seven annual Festivus gatherings so far, Lianne and Mark Yarvis of Portland, Oregon, have invented their own tradition that specifies the pole must be “borrowed” and brought by a guest. A flagpole with a gold eagle on top has been among those that have served.
The pole is then passed around during the Airing of Grievances. Whosoever holds the pole must grieve. “Some people are shy about it, but if you’re handed the pole it’s clearly your turn,” Lianne, 36, says. “It puts people on the spot. It helps break the shyness. We don’t want anybody to weasel out.”
TOPPING
While topping is not at all necessary, some, like Troy Kinnaird and his chums in Knoxville, Tennessee, choose to add low-key
Seinfeld
-inspired, untinselly headpieces to the pole.
Since Junior Mints, a chocolate-covered candy that in one episode of
Seinfeld
accidentally drops into a patient’s body during surgery, are often served at Festivuses (another plural of Festivus), it’s worth considering puncturing the candy’s white cardboard box and impaling it.
Three Knoxville, Tennessee, pals who impale
AS AN APHRODISIAC
Putting a pole in the middle of a room at a party can attract strippers. At West End Comedy Theatre’s 2004 Festivus celebration in Dallas, which advertised “for the nondenominational, an inoffensive get-together,” female comedians took turns dancing provocatively with the pole. Party organizer Doug Ewart was stunned—and pleased. Set up under a spot-light on the comedy club’s stage, “The pole saw more action than anyone else,” Ewart says. “I thought it was a pretty neat development.” He adds that the pole will definitely be a part of future Festivus festivities.
FOR LIMBO
While it’s true that the ready availability of a metal pole can lead to some destructive party behavior (impromptu indoor baseball, apple hockey, and pretend-Superman-bend-the-rod-until-herniating not least among them), there is one primitive pole-based party activity that has lent itself perfectly to the spontaneous nature of Festivus. “My friend Dan always ends up starting a game of limbo,” says Sara King, 29, a psychology graduate student who hosts an annual Festivus party in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Dan Boudreau, a medical student, is the three-years-running Festivus limbo champion of Halifax.
A warning: After limbo, the pole, now loose on the dance floor, cannot be trusted. “We used a coatrack one year,” Sara says. “It got smashed all up and ended up in bed with me. I passed out and I have no idea what happened. I woke up the next morning and it was all in pieces in my bed.”
Basic Rules of Festivus Limbo, Halifax-Style
S
tart the music (recommended: “The Limbo Rock” by Chubby Checker: “Limbo ankolim-bonee / Bend back like a limbo tree . . . ”).
Two players hold the pole at either end and the rest of the players form a line and try to pass under the pole without touching it.
Players cannot have any body part but their feet touching the floor.
The pole gets lowered with each round. The last player left who has not grazed aluminum is the winner.
The champion receives a shot of Sambuca. Then everyone else does shots of Sambuca, too.
NOT HAVING ONE
On the evidence, not having a pole can lead to overintellecru-alization of Festivus. Scott McLemee, a Washington, D.C.-based columnist for
Inside Higher Ed,
filed this piece explaining his decision to go poleless. He requests that no one leave a comment on his blog (
www.mclemee.com
) telling him exactly where he can stick a pole should he choose to purchase one next year.
Antidisestablishpoletarianism
by Scott McLemee
E
ach year, my wife and I invite friends to gather around the aluminum pole—or at least the place it would be, if we ever got around to buying one—and discuss the True Meaning of Festivus. After long cogitation, I’ve concluded that Festivus is the post-modern “invented tradition” par excellence.
In the premodern era, when people lived in villages, spring would draw near and everybody would think, “Time for the big party where we all eat and drink a lot and pretend for a few days not to notice each other humping like bunnies.” People didn’t say, “We do X because it is our tradition.”
But then, starting maybe three hundred years ago, things got modern, and people started inventing traditions. In the nineteenth century folks started singing “traditional Christmas carols,” even though for hundreds of years they celebrated with regular church hymns.
Postmodernism is what happens after you’ve been modern so long that being modern doesn’t seem special. You start putting things in quotation marks—I could cite stuff here about “the decline of metanarratives” and “the simulacrum.” I guess I just did.
At Festivus, all the vague hostility of enforced togetherness gets an outlet. It’s hard to get sentimental about an aluminum pole, but as long as there are midwinter holidays, the spirit of Festivus will fill the air.
SOUVENIR
Guests departing from Krista Soroka’s annual Festivus bash in Tampa, Florida, take with them something to remember Festivus by all year long. Here’s how she does it.
Mini-Pole Party Favor
MATERIALS
plaster of Paris
container and stir stick for mixing plaster
1-inch-tall terra-cotta (also known as unglazed clay) pot
2-to 3-inch-long straight nail with a narrow (not flat) head
toothpick
paper
glue stick
marker
INSTRUCTIONS
Sign:
Cut a piece of paper into a rectangle that is one inch by two inches. Fold it in half into a square. Write “Festivus Yes! Bagels No!” so that the folded edge is on top. Rub the glue stick on the inside of the folded paper, then fold it back over the toothpick and seal on both sides.
Potting Mini-Pole:
Follow the directions on the plaster of Paris box for mixing the amount of plaster you need. Pour into the pot. Quickly insert the nail into the pot (with the sharp point first so that the party favor can’t be used as a weapon if the Grievance Airing gets out of hand) and hold it in place till the plaster dries. If you have made a sign, insert it immediately after you insert the nail. Hold both in place while the plaster dries.
Tinsel
Is Forbidden on Festivus. Too distracting, they say.
The tinsel industry will survive the indignity, says Marcia Ceppos, owner of the Tinsel Trading Company in New York City. “Tinsel was used going back to the 1700s,” Ceppos notes. It’s still used now. Designers such as Ralph Lauren, Elie Tahari, and Nanette Lepore have sewn Ceppos’s tinsel into their recent clothing lines. Fly fishermen also use it to craft lures.
Anyway, sighs Steven Soprano, store manager of Holiday Tree and Trim in Bayonne, New Jersey, the increasing number of people who celebrate the holidays with artificial trees have been shunning tinsel for years. With the natural trees people used in earlier eras, tinsel gets thrown away when the dried-out tree is tossed, requiring new tinsel to be purchased every year. But with fake trees that are reused annually, one application of tinsel last forever. “You put the stuff on there,” Soprano says, “it’s going to be a pain to take off there.”
Soprano says he’s not scared of losing a few more tinsel sales to Festivus. “We may get stuck with the product,” he says, “but we’ll probably use it to decorate around here.”
Festivus Cards
For years, there were no commercially available Festivus cards, spurring regular folk to burst forth with creative greetings and party invitations. Eventually, Noble Works, a New Jersey-based gag card maker, had the idea to come out with a Festivus line. They used a dollop of content from the first edition of this book—and paid the author a pittance. Which is only fair since sales of the cards have only been “OK,” according to Noble Works owner Ron Kanfi. The company has done better with their other lines, such as one in which vegetables are pictured dressed up in human garb. A particular charmer shows an avocado staring at two ears of corn pictured on a computer screen. The caption: “Kevin spent the entire day downloading corn from the internet.”
Hallmark has yet to weigh in on Festivus.
Homespun Festivus Greetings
The Human Fund, the Festivus Fruitcake, and other Gifts
One of the attributes of Festivus is that there are no required gifts, no expected gifts, and, usually, no gifts at all.
On the Festivus episode of
Seinfeld,
the character George Costanza dreams up a fake charity called The Human Fund as a way to give people he doesn’t care about a gift that costs him nothing. He hands office mates a card informing each that a donation has been made in his or her name to the fund. The card explains: “The Human Fund: Money for People.”
Many real-world Festivites simply copy Costanza, handing out Human Fund cards. Others do give actual gifts. These have included used ChapSticks left in pockets from long-ago ski trips, balky handcuffs, and annoying talking dolls—all of which seem to establish a universal Festivus gift creed: Give only something you don’t want that you expect the recipient doesn’t want either.
Nothing, of course, is considered more useless and unwanted than a fruitcake. Here is a card that the operator of one Festivus Web site has developed for elevating any regular fruitcake into a Festivus Fruitcake.
The Foods and Drinks of Festivus
