Happy Festivus to you and yours. You remember don’t you? “Festivus for the rest of us!” (That line always makes me smile.) For all you non-“Seinfeld” fans, Festivus is a wacky holiday popularized in a 1997 “Seinfeld” episode. In the episode the holiday was celebrated by the Costanza clan on December 23rd and featured an airing of grievances and feats of strength in which a guest must pin the host before the party ends. The holiday was the creation of Frank Constanza as a protest of Christmas’ commercialism. In the show he puts up an unadorned aluminum pole instead of a tree. The metal, he says braggingly, has a “very high strength-to-weight ratio.”
I thought I loved that episode, but hearing what one Wisconsin business owner has done with the Festivus idea, puts my admiration for the show to shame. Wagner, a Milwaukee-based maker of hand-railing components, has created a line of Festivus poles for the holiday season. (It actually launched the product last year on a whim.)
“We did it mainly as a lark. We never looked at it as a tremendous moneymaking scheme,” the firm’s executive vice president of sales and marketing told local news reporters. “But in many ways, Festivus is taking on a life of its own.”
Company officials say they sold about 250 poles in 2005, but this season, the company already sold about 300 poles by mid-December and was on pace to sell twice that number by Christmas. Wagner is currently offering a 6-foot Festivus pole for $38 and a 2-foot-8-inch tabletop model for $30. The setup couldn’t be simpler: a hollow pipe, 1.9 inches in diameter, inserted into a collapsible aluminum base. Executives at the company say they have shipped the Festivus poles all over the country from Atlanta to Lake Tahoe.
And for all you who can’t get enough “Seinfeld” trivia–the Festivus episode was developed from series writer Dan O’Keefe’s childhood experiences. O’Keefe claims his father invented the holiday in the 1960s. However, instead of a pole, he says his family’s celebration featured a clock and a bag.
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