Elayne Riggs' Journal (for Leah)

Sunday, December 23, 2007

Silly Site o' the Day

Ten years ago, the portion of the American viewing public that still watched the sitcom Seinfeld learned about a made-up holiday called Festivus. I had long since given up on Seinfeld, when the characters just got too mean and pointless for me to enjoy. I know I watched some '90s sitcoms, but nothing with slavish regularity. I can't recall ever being able to sit through an entire episode of Friends. And I was naive enough to believe that, as our entertainment choices grew exponentially with the advent of home computers and videogames and so on, the number of people who actually paid attention to these shows was relatively small. So I never cultivated the cultural vocabulary that included Ross and Rachel, or Uncle Jesse, or the ability to answer any of these questions. And I never heard of Festivus until a few years ago, when it seemed to be everyone's favorite in-joke.

Here's the Wikipedia entry on the made-up day, which is supposedly celebrated every December 23. I feel a little less duped finding out that Festivus was actually created by the father of a Seinfeld writer, not by the show itself. And while I can appreciate the inherent silliness of the concept, and the satire it presents of a culture obsessed with celebrating something, anything to mark the passing of a year and the rebirth of the sun/lengthening of the day, I admit to being a little disturbed at how easily folks have latched onto something everyone acknowledges is fake and meaningless and invested it with actual significance (if only by the act of giving it attention in the first place).

Is this how other rituals and "holy days" come into being? Kwanzaa didn't exist when I was born. It was a celebration wholly created from scratch, using symbols and rites invested with meaning by the people who made it up. Just like Festivus. And just like Christmas, or Eid-al-Adha, or Unduwap Poya, or Chanukah, or Saturnalia, or Hogwatch. Even an essentially secular celebration like Festivus contains the meaning we give it, and that meaning makes the day sacred to those who mark it.

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