‘Stop Crying And Fight Your Father’: ‘Seinfeld’ Writers Tell How Festivus Came To Be
By Ashley Burns and Chloe Schildhause
The real Festivus was created in 1966 by author Daniel O’Keefe, not out of a hatred of all of the commercial and religious aspects of Christmas, but as a unique celebration. His son, Dan O’Keefe, grew up to become a writer for Seinfeld and worked on episodes like “The Pothole,” “The Blood,” and “The Frogger,” among others. But “The Strike” forever became his legacy when the show’s other writers caught wind of the story of this bizarre holiday ritual.
“It is a fake holiday my dad made up in the ’60s to celebrate the anniversary of his first date with my mother, and it was something that we celebrated as a family in a very peculiar way through the ‘70s, and then I never spoke of it again,” O’Keefe tells us. “I had actually forgotten about it because I had blotted it out of my mind.”
“My brother Mark mentioned it to Jeff Schaffer,” O’Keefe recalls. “Jeff told Alec and Dave [Mandel] and, as I recall, they had me meet at Swingers, this diner in Hollywood, and then one of them sat on the other side of me so I couldn’t leave. They asked about Festivus and I said I didn’t really want to talk about it. They said, ‘Well, Mark told us about it,’ and I said, ‘That f*cker.’ They said, ‘We think it might be funny in the show,’ and I said, ‘I think it’s a mistake and sort of a family shame.’ No one had ever expressed any interest in it before, but I swear I thought it was going to be cut out in the edits.”
“He was like, ‘Really? You want to do that?’ I was like, ‘Yes! Yes!’” Schaffer explains. “That’s the thing with Seinfeld stories, the real ones are always the best ones. You can almost always tell, ‘Oh, that really happened to you,’ when people would pitch stories. There’s a nuance to reality sometimes that is just perfect. We could have sat in a room for a billion years and we never would have made up Festivus. It’s crazy and hilarious and just so funny and so disturbing. It’s awesome, we gotta put it on television.”
O’Keefe was reluctant to bring this part of his buried past to the series, but Berg eventually approved the idea and Festivus became a reality. This concerned O’Keefe, because while the Costanza version of Festivus was hilarious and insane, the O’Keefe version of Festivus was not. In fact, the real story of Festivus could change the way that people throw around one of the episode’s most popular quotes.
“At the time I was just a terrified staff writer hoping that this episode wouldn’t let everyone in America know that my family suffers from mental illness,” O’Keefe says.
“Each Festivus had a theme, which were always depressing. One was, ‘Is there light at the end of the tunnel?’ ‘Are we too easily made glad?’ was one, I believe. My grandmother died the next year and it was ‘A Festivus for the Rest of Us,’ meaning the living and not the departed. It’s pretty goddamn weird.”
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Festivus becoming a reality, then, was that O’Keefe would eventually have to tell his father that Seinfeld would be using the family’s history as a gag. Would the man who created this holiday and kept it running for very personal reasons be hurt by it being mocked and misrepresented to millions of TV viewers?
“My mother’s attitude was, ‘That’s nice honey,’ ” O’Keefe remembers. “My father was at first enraged that he thought he was being made fun of by me, which then subsequently turned into consideration, then exuberance because he thought he’d been vindicated and this had, in fact, justified every decision he had made in his entire life. He would use that somehow to defend some very dubious things. So he completely embraced it, yes, in a matter of months.”
As for the specifics of the holiday, Frank had an aluminum pole because he appreciated the “very high strength-to-weight ratio” and found tinsel to be distracting. The O’Keefe family had something slightly more… unusual. “The reality of the holiday was too peculiar to show on television,” O’Keefe says.
“The real symbol of the holiday was a clock inside a bag nailed to the wall and nearby a sign that says, ‘F*ck Fascism.’ That doesn’t fly on network TV. Either Alec or Jeff came up with the idea of the pole and the strength to weight ratio.”
Why a pole? Berg reveals, “That came out of Festivus being anti-commercial, and what’s the least like a tree? A warm living thing, and just an antiseptic metal pole.”
The airing of grievances, however, was an entirely accurate portrayal of the original Festivus.
“Airing your grievances was a large portion of the original and it was done into a tape recorder,” O’Keefe explains. “I think my father did occasionally refer to it as airing your grievances. So that was real, and being made to sing into a tape recorder. Songs we learned in school. Those tapes exist and are held in a secure location.”
http://uproxx.com/tv/seinfeld-festivus-true-story/3/
