Festivus

by Allen Salkin

  Setting the struggle in Queens changed the outcome. In the original play, the son wins. In the New York City borough, the father triumphs.

  Wrestling can injure. In Tucson, Arizona, Trevor and Janet Hare threw their first annual Festivus party in December 1997 just a few days after the first-ever airing of the Seinfeld Festivus episode. “I wound up wrestling all my nephews,” Trevor, a conservation biologist, says. “Until 1999, when I threw my back out doing it.” Things at the Hare Festivus are less lumbar-intensive now. “We have impromptu arm wrestling and leg wrestling.”

  Less likely to cause injury—at first—is the practice of Alex Watson of Sheffield, England, whose friends square off using the WWE Smackdown video game. “We divide into two teams, often based on the football teams we support,” he says.

  Be careful when wrestling Dad—he’s crafty

  In the end, though, beating the hell out of one’s friends onscreen is just no substitute for leaping into actual pile drivers, body slams, eye-socket gouges, and Siberian death-locks. “It soon breaks down into a real brawl,” Alex admits, “where we try and pin the members of the opposite team.”

  JULIANNE’S UNORTHODOX FEATS OF STRENGTH

  More civilized forms of cathartic aggression have been devised. Julianne Donovan’s Festivus party in Kansas City, Missouri, flaunts a fricassee of fantastic Feats of Strength.

  Most popular is the thumb-wrestling tournament, held in a leopard-spotted, red-pillared, pizza-box-sized ring. Contestants slip thumbs into tiny wrestling masks and work their hands up into the ring from underneath. Once inside the ropes, they battle until one thumb is pinned. The winner is awarded the victor’s outfit, a red-and-black felt cape with a bow tie and rhinestones that fits snugly over the opposable digit that sets man apart from the beasts.

  Another body-part-testing FOS at Julianne’s party is the head-dunking-in-ice challenge. Whoever can keep his or her face held underwater in ice water the longest wins a pair of handcuffs. The 2004 champion made it to three minutes. “We thought he was going to pass out and die,” says Julianne, a graphic designer. “It’s probably good that if you try this at home, you should have someone who can resuscitate people.”

  It is okay to smoke cigarettes while participating in the outdoor hula-hoop contest. Not so for the indoor activity of weight-holding. Contestants hold a hand weight with one arm extended straight out. The winner is the person who holds the weight in the air longest without buckling.

  The activities add spark—and cull creeps. “If you’re around boring people or some obnoxious man,” Julianne says, “you can say, ‘Oh, there’s thumb wrestling in the other room. Bye!’”

  Not that hookups are frowned upon. A somewhat suggestive Big Ball competition requires contestants to blow up balloon punch-balls and punch them for as long as possible without losing control.

  And then later, perhaps as a result of releasing all this aggression, comes spin-the-bottle. This, Julianne says of the 2004 party, resulted in an impressive feat.

  “Everyone was making out with each other.”

  BULL RIDING

  Speaking of looking for love, the hit 1980 movie Urban Cowboy, which featured the song “Looking for Love (In All the Wrong Places),” ushered in a trend of bars installing mechanical bulls. If the way they celebrate Festivus in Springfield, Illinois, catches on, mechanical bulls could ride high again.

  In addition to the Pontani sisters’ “clean burlesque” act and ample beer, the Winter Festivus Pageant held in 2004 in a Hilton ballroom featured, as its FOS challenge, a mechanical bull. (There was also, appropriately, a band called Los Straitjackets, who performed surf music wearing Mexican wrestling masks—but there was no actual wrestling, Mexican or any other kind.)

  This unusual Feat of Strength helped host Wade Ebert talk a friend out of attending an office holiday party and into forking out $15 to join hundreds of others at the Festivus pageant. “I told him,” Ebert recalls, “’Christ, I got a band, I got two bands, I got four Mexican wrestling masks, I got three go-go dancers, I got a mechanical bull. Why don’t you bring some people from your lame Christmas party?’ Guy skipped the Christmas party, came to Festivus instead.”

  A Feat of Strength in Spingfield, Illinois

  What killed the bull fad in the 1980s was a grisly toll of broken arms and concussions. But at Ebert’s Festivus, promisingly, there were no injuries.

  An Unusual Distraction from the Feats of Strength: Cat with a Lion Cut

  Ata Festivus party in Louisville, Kentucky, guests were stunned when the host family’s cat sprang into the living room with a “lion cut,” its torso shorn nearly bald but the mane left full around the head and the fur long at the feet and tip of the tail. The hosts claimed they had shorn the feline in an effort to prevent dreadlocks, but guests suspected the awful primping was merely an effort to startle Festivus guests so profoundly that they’d falter during the Feats of Strength. “I found it distracting,” said Lisa, a guest who asked that her last name not appear in print. “Every time the cat would come in, my friend and I would scream and point and laugh. Eventually the cat stopped coming in.”

  Lisa and the other guests were unlikely to do well at the Feats of Strength in any case because they were spending so much time around a four-foot-high, water-filled tobacco-smoking devise. “It was our pole,” Lisa recalled. The sweet-smelling pole and the weird cat were just about all she recalled. “There might have been wrestling. I can’t remember,” she said. Then she started talking about the cat again. “That poor animal looked really pissed off.”

  Despite repeated calls, the hosts who gave the lion cut to their cat refused comment. The following photos of a different cat with a lion cut were found while researching this book, were taken long before work began on this book, and were not set up or done for this book. The author likes cats and would never lion cut one.

  This, the author suggests, is unFestivuslike.

  Festivus Miracles

  These are basically not miracles. Like the praising of a host’s bare aluminum pole, declaring that something is “a Festivus miracle!” is a smart-ass way Festivusers mock the clichés of other holidays. One such cliché is apparent every time a 6—5 college football team wins whatever lame bowl game is being played on December 25 that year, and the team’s local newspaper headlines the victory a “CHRISTMAS MIRACLE!”

  Christmas and Hanukkah and other “real” holidays are supposed to commemorate real miracles, like a one-day supply of oil lasting eight days and a virgin giving birth—not a trained field goal kicker kicking a 28-yard winning field goal against another 6–5 team or an automobile company offering onetime only 1.5 percent financing on all vehicles bought from dealer stock before January 10.

  In fact, a mediocre deal on car financing and a field goal kicker kicking a field goal are much more like Festivus miracles than Christmas miracles, no matter what a TV ad or a sports page blares. They’re not miraculous. Just as someone’s friend named Max who was invited to a Festivus party and who said he was going to show up at that Festivus party and who is known for keeping his commitments actually arriving at the party sometime around the time he said he was going to arrive is not a real miracle. It’s a semipleasant or potentially unpleasant—if Max is not well-liked—reality.

  Thus, when Max enters the room, Festivus custom deems it appropriate to cry out, “Max is here! It’s a Festivus miracle.”

  If Max is not liked, it is considered best for the person who likes him least to declare the miracle. In that way, the automobile company, the 6—5 team, Max, and everything else so deserving is mocked.

  New Festivus Activities

  The rules of this holiday are not written in stone—or even Jell-O. There are no unbreakable rules written down at all. It is possible that there is a holiday being celebrated right now on the planet Gorzex during which elder females, for entertainment, spew regurgitated skeelg larvae onto fled-derberry flowers. As long as that behavior is not absolutely required by the dictates of s
ome higher authority, the Gorzexians are free to call the holiday Festivus as far as any Earthlings are concerned.

  In fact, they can change the whole thing around and juggle ligmomarry pups (they like being juggled) on their Festivus if they want. Festivus can stand it. Can any other human holiday?

  Evidence for this Gorzexian level of adaptability is found in the way humans here on Earth have molded the holiday to fit their whims.

  WASHER PITCHING

  For instance, the Festivus party that Katherine Willis, an actress, and her husband, Jed Thornock, a computer programmer, give in Austin, Texas, every Christmas Eve eve includes a backyard game of “pitching washers.” Katherine calls it “the redneck equivalent of horseshoes.”

  “There’s basically a hole in the ground,” she says. “You try to throw the washers in the hole, and apparently the more you drink the better you get at it.”

  A new festivus ritual

  The game of pitching washers and Festivus share similar homespun roots. It’s not surprising they found each other. In its literature, the International Association of Washer Players (IAWP) suggests the game likely started with a backyard wager that went something like: “Betcha I can toss this here washer into that oil can over yonder.”

  Here Are the Basic IAWP Rules for Pitching Washers

  (A complete set, along with tips on strategy, is available at www.washers.org.)

  If possible, use 2.5-inch-diameter washers.

  Generally, there should be two holes in the ground, each about 4 inches in diameter and 4.5 inches in depth, 25 feet apart with players facing one another. Players must pitch from within one stride of the hole on their side.

  Each player’s turn consists of pitching two washers at the opposite hole. A washer in the hole (called “a cupper”) counts for 5 points unless an opponent also holes one, in which case the cupper is considered “capped” and is canceled out.

  After each round, if no one has scored 5 points, the washer closest to the hole counts for one point.

  First team to 21 wins: 11-0 is a skunk.

  FESTIVUS FRISBEE GOLF

  In the spirit of travel to Gorzex, Festivus for Greg Johnson is all about flying saucers—of a sort. Because disc golf uses poles as targets instead of holes as in regular golf, it occurred to Greg, a Seinfeld fan and treasurer of the Willamette Disc Golf Club, to name the annual local tournament he hosts “Festivus.” He prints special discs, showing Mary’s Peak of the Oregon Coast Range in the background and a pole in the center.

  Festivus Frisbee golf uses poles as holes

  In 2004, tournament co-winners split a $78 prize. “I would have won myself for the Advanced Masters division,” Greg, still upset, says, “if not for a Tin Cup—style collapse, throwing out of bounds three times in a row on my second-to-last hole.” Before the event, there’d been talk that the tourney couldn’t end until someone wrestled Greg to the ground. In the end, no one tried. “They figured I was not in the mood after my collapse.”

  FESTIVUS TRIVIA TEAM

  For a group of college students in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, Festivus is celebrated with trivia. The “Festivus for the Rest of Us” group bills itself as “The Hottest Young Trivia Team This Side of the Little Plover River.”

  FFTROU competes in major regional contests. Generally, these marathon competitions are run by small radio stations, which broadcast questions over the air. Dozens—sometimes hundreds–of teams like FFTROU gather themselves computer-filled rooms and try to find answers quickly as possible using any resource they want. The answers are phoned in to the radio station and after fifty or so straight hours of trivia, the team with the highest score wins.

  Trivia team logo

  FFTROU celebrates a correct answer with a victory dance

  Things can get strange in the pressure cooker of the trivia room at contest time. After taking a bite of a friend’s brownie at a 2003 contest, team co-captain Greg Ormes looked up in bliss and asked, “Has the whole world gone delicious?” Later, team member Justin Young wondered aloud, “Did you know we could clean the whole room with duct tape?”

  FFTROU’s highest finish so far is 29th out of 72 teams at the St. Cloud, Minnesota, TSI: Trivia Scene Investigation contest run by station KVSC 88.1-FM. During hour 13 of that contest came one of FFTROU’s greatest moments, a complete guess that turned out to be correct. “A Festivus Miracle,” Greg says.

  QUESTION: In the television series Kablam! during the segment “Life with Loopy” there was a skit called “2000 Leagues Under the Sofa.” What did level 94 feature?

  ANSWER: Jimmy Hoffa.

  Festivus Mating Rituals

  The AOG, the FOS—enough rituals for some, but for others, a party’s not a party unless there’s booty-chasing. That’s why these Festivus innovators have added activities to set the libido panting.

  Festivus can sometimes get complicated

  KISS YOUR EX-LOVER

  Bob and Jane and Ted and Lise have had about as many romantic entanglements with one another as a group of four can have. Most of the year, the 50-something-year-olds live separate lives, but come Festivus, which for them flits between January and February depending on the friends’ schedules, everyone heads to Lise’s apartment in Binghamton, New York, and the old sparks fly.

  “Tom and Bob still lust after Lise,” says Jane Harrow, a retired schoolteacher and, according to her, the most chaste of the bunch.

  There must be some magic in that old aluminum banister Jane drags over each year and plunks into a Christmas tree stand. In the middle of winter, passions of springtimes past blossom anew. “Lise is extremely vain and extremely good-looking,” Jane says. “We take group photos, always one with Bob kissing Lise.”

  The four soldier on, ignoring the month and the years of the calendar, hewing to their invented take on the invented holiday. They sing “O Festivus” to the tune of “O Christmas Tree,” adding the lyrics, “for the rest of us.” They eat macaroons. Last year Tom gave Jane a gift, a DVD of Saturday Night Live. She doesn’t have a DVD player. She complained at his thoughtlessness. He accepted that he was a disappointment. By midnight it was over. As can happen when salad days have passed, nothing went beyond the kissing and everyone slept snug in separate beds.

  EROTIC PERFORMANCES

  Enter the Alwun House, a nonprofit art space in Phoenix, Arizona, for the February 2005 edition of the annual Erotic Poetry and Music Festivus and be greeted by three women dressed as Playboy bunnies with bright pink hair.

  Promising. Continue into a large bottom-floor room and find performers beating tambourines, stroking guitars, and reading sixteenth-century erotic poetry in a show called “Mystic Rapture.”

  Flit to another gallery, where it’s best to avoid getting too close to the Ritual Fire dancers. They are smeared with flammable gel that titillates them as they play erotically for a transfixed audience.

  The art includes a man with his hand in a sock that he argues with as if it’s an unruly part of the male anatomy. It is an old fight that many have had before. Can love follow lust or must the order be reversed?

  This is not Seinfeld’s Festivus, explains Kim Moody, director of the Alwun House. This Valentine’s-season Festivus harkens from the holiday’s original inventors. “I always liked ancient Rome,” Moody says. “It might have something to do with the men running around in black leather thongs.”

  Above the bar, a troupe of fifteen Kama Sutra dancers called “Of the Earth” writhe.

  “To me,” Moody concludes, “the word ‘Festivus’ means ‘refined hedonism.’”

  MISS FESTIVUS

  “I felt very important,” Julie Manker of Pleasant Plains, Illinois, says of the moment when the Miss Festivus sash, cobbled together from newspaper clippings and oddly shaped letters, was laid across her shoulders at a Festivus bash in Springfield, Illinois, on December 18, 2004, also the day of her 30th birthday.

  Julie Manker in all her glory

  It’s true there weren’t actually any other con
testants. Julie simply decided she was Miss Festivus and crowned herself—a nonconformist criteria she suggests all future Miss Festivuses follow.

  As a model for future queens, Julie stands tall.

  When she was just 20 months old, Julie was already earning celebrity status. She was written up in a local bowling magazine as the youngest bowler ever in Illinois.

  “My father owned three bowling alleys,” the bespectacled Julie, ever not-demure, says.

  After she broke her leg playing volleyball on a scholarship to Butler University, doctors said Julie would have trouble playing any sport again. The future Miss Festivus scoffed at the diagnosis. She headed to Winter Park, Colorado, to take up snowboarding.

  Before long, she was bored with living the life of a shred-betty: by day flying over death-defying snow jumps and by night talking about flying over death-defying snow jumps. She set out to find a new challenge.

  The Springfield Fire Department was looking for a few good women, and Julie took their test. She dragged dummies, worked hoses, flaunted her skills mouth-to-mouth, and aced it.

  Miss Festivus’s boyfriend’s magazine

  The department hasn’t yet had an opening for her, so in the meantime she works as high school technology teacher. Miss Festivus also helps out her boyfriend, Chris Nickell, editor in chief of Impala SScene, a magazine for people involved in souping up and racing 1994-199 Chevrolet Impala SS and other GM B-Bo models.

  Suggested Categories for Judging a Miss Festivus Content

  by Chris Nickell, boyfriend of Julie Manker, the original Miss Festivus

  • How she looks laying down in the backseat of an Impala

  • Bowling talent (in the 170 neighborhood is nice)

  • Mechanical bull riding aptitude

  • How shapely she appears in a firefighter’s outfit