When I was tasked with the job of writing something devotionally inspiring, while at the same time sort of biblically sound for this season of Advent, my thoughts immediately went to my most identifiable character from the hit TV show Seinfeld—that being George Costanza and his tradition of celebrating, instead of Christmas, the holiday of Festivus. A holiday made up by his father when George was 9 years old and dad lost his proverbial bananas while trying to shop for a doll for his son.
In the TV series, Jerry Seinfeld is the snarky stand-up comedian; George Costanza, the grumpy, late 30s, often unemployed man who lives at home with his parents; Elaine Benes, the serial-dating, ex-girlfriend of Jerry, and the only female balance to the men on the show, although mostly through a neurotically skewed lens; and Cosmo Kramer, Jerry’s neighbor who is able to survive mysteriously on short-term, part-time jobs that never last. Add a few here-and-there characters to the mix, and we pretty much have a full person—full of all our natural quirks, idiosyncrasies, desires and disappointments. And the fact that any of us could identify with any or all of these characters depending on the day is, all by itself, a full semester college psychology course.
The motto for Festivus is “A Festivus for the rest of us!”—a holiday for those who have given up on the others. For Festivus, the usual Christmas tradition of a tree is contradicted with an unadorned aluminum pole, standing in direct contrast to the new normal of holiday materialism. Those attending Festivus also participate in the “Airing of Grievances,” which is an opportunity to tell others how they have disappointed you in the past year, followed by a Festivus dinner, and then completed by the “Feats of Strength” event where the head of the household must be pinned.
For George Costanza’s family, Festivus is celebrated each year on Dec. 23 and, as I learned, has caught on with many even outside the show as a stand against what Christmas has become. I mean by real, live people, who have given up hope on the most hopeful holiday of the year. I may be one of them.
I think I’ve become more and more anti-Christmas the older I’ve gotten, and my less-than-joyful attitude is starting to spread to pretty much every other holiday, except for the happy fact that I may have the day off work. I can totally understand Fourth of July and support it fully as both a memory and a reminder of some pretty awesome history. I can even understand Thanksgiving, except for the retail portion of the holiday when stores compete over who can open the earliest. Maybe Macy’s will offer a Thanksgiving Day buffet right there in the store to give people more energy to shop.
And truth be told, Christmas usually makes me sad. Especially Wilshire’s Christmas Eve worship service. But not the kind of sad like when your dog dies, but the kind that I can’t quite figure out so it feels even sadder because it can’t be identified. I’m basically a crier at candlelight anything and at any and all children singing. There’s some buried psychology in that one somewhere, too. Maybe I need to re-watch the entire nine years of Seinfeld with that in mind.
I also think I haven’t figured out how to calendar the feeling of joy. How to summon it up, to call it to duty for a specific date or occasion. And add to the mystery, the frazzly expectations that the modern version of our Christmas holiday imposes on us before we can even begin to sit down to eat, or in between the million versions of Jingle Bells, and I get a little over the whole thing before it gets started.
Now enter stage right, the biblical command/request/suggestion to rejoice in the Lord always. Not just sometimes. Not just when I feel like it. And not based upon a previously scheduled event. Just always. Like when I wake up in the morning. When I go to bed at night. When I think I may have serial killer tendencies in the long line at T.J. Maxx in December. In fact, in one translation of today’s verse, the command is to rejoice always and to let our gentleness be known to all. In another version it asks to let our kindness, even our fairness, be evident to all. Because y’all, sometimes it’s just not, and I guess Paul, the author of Philippians, already had a pretty good sense of where our world was headed.
And I suppose however over the commercialism of the holidays we are, whether we choose to celebrate Christmas or Festivus, or sit this year out as a gap year, the lesson in it all, for me, anyway, is that the promise of Christmas isn’t about the holiday but about the days to come. That no matter how much purchased or created joy we build our traditions on, the real deal about joy is to just jump in somewhere, often and always.
