Customer Reviews

The Real Festivus

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Great details and amusing insight into how the whole Festivus holiday came about, as told by the guy who wrote the Seinfeld episode it was introduced in. But I hadn't expected the book to be this FUNNY. O'Keefe has a lot of great jokes throughout - from what's wrong with other holidays, to theories about why his dad invented the holiday, to other odd family rituals.

Interestingly enough - the book also features a very funny introduction written by George himself, Jason Alexander. Why this feature isn't advertised here is kinda odd.

If you're a fan of laughter (and who isn't?) - you'll be a fan of this book.

I just purchased this two days ago, and I literally couldn't put it down. I figured since it's by a Seinfeld writer it would be funny, and it is, but it's also almost a memoir, and a really personal story that's kind of cool. The way this holiday originated in O'Keeffe's family is really unusual, but really heartwarming - it was originally to celebrate his parents' first date!

My favorite part is the transcriptions of the actual Festivus celebrations from 1976, 77, 80 and 85. They actually tape recorded the whole holiday, and it feels like you're actually there celebrating Festivus with them. Long Live FESTIVUS!

This book is so funny I'm telling all my friends about it.

Jason Alexander who played George Costanza kicks it off with a hilarious introduction, about how he's always being asked about Festivus. It's so George. Any true Seinfeld fan has to read it.

The author of this book wrote the actual Festivus episode of Seinfeld. He based it on his own experience, because his father invented the holiday. It gives the a low-down, behind the scenes look at how Festivus orginated, and how to celebrate it. The author's like a real life George Costanza, it's like he actually lived the Seinfeld episdode.

Tons of funny jokes, little pictures, and short hilarious chapters. An quick and easy, really, really, really funny read. Obviously a good Festivus present...

If you're a Seinfeld fan you know all about Festivus, the faux holiday that was invented by George Costanza's father Frank:

Frank Costanza: Many Christmases ago, I went to buy a doll for my son. I reached for the last one they had, but so did another man. As I rained blows upon him, I realized there had to be another way.

Cosmo Kramer: What happened to the doll?

Frank Costanza: It was destroyed. But out of that a new holiday was born: a Festivus for the rest of us!

In the Seinfeld episode ("The Strike"), the celebration of Festivus involves an aluminum pole, feats of strength, and a ritual airing of grievances. It is not, at least in George's view, an occasion of celebration, but rather a holiday to be endured. The idea of Festivus has nonetheless leapt from the small screen into the popular imagination. Need a Festivus pole for your own real-life celebration? You can buy a six-foot floor model online.

As it turns out, Festivus did not spring fully formed from the heads of Seinfeld's writers. It sprang from the imagination of Daniel O'Keefe Sr., the father of one of those writers. The O'Keefe family actually celebrated Festivus annually during the 1970's and 80's while Dan O'Keefe and his two younger brothers were growing up. But as the author explains in The Real Festivus, the holiday they observed was rather different from--if no less bizarre than--the celebration popularized on television:

"Though only a family of five originally celebrated Festivus, these days it is celebrated by literally dozens of prisoners, college students, and bored people in rural areas across this great nation. And some crappier nations like Canada and Uruguay. And God bless them all and keep them from rape and thresher accidents. But they're doing it all wrong."

In this record-straightening book, O'Keefe explains the genesis of Festivus, its symbols (a clock and a bag, but no pole) and rituals. Festivus was celebrated (irregularly, with no set date) with depressing music and the recitation of poetry and the ingestion of meat. There were strange hats and coarse political statements. Each year one or more themes were assigned to the holiday. (In 1977, for example, the theme was, "Are We Depressed? Yes!") But the most important element of Festivus was the annual tape recording. More than half of this book is taken up with a transcription of some of those Festivus tapes--jokes and pronouncements and embarrassing family secrets and summaries of the family's history since the last recording.

Do these transcripts make for interesting reading? Well, not per se. We readers are like outsiders peering through the O'Keefe's windows. The boys are teasing one another, their mother sitting to the side, for the most part quiet. Their father is hamming it up in front of the cassette recorder, now speaking German, now breaking into song, now declaiming in some more or less meaningful pidgin Romance language. Most of the jokes are lost on us, but we can appreciate the atmosphere within. And so the Festivus transcripts, if not riveting, wind up providing us with a surprisingly intimate portrait of a family, its members intelligent and deeply odd, playful but mutually supportive.

In his humorous introduction to The Real Festivus Jason Alexander (George Costanza on Seinfeld) says of the book that it is "a shameless attempt to cash in on an international phenomenon. It is airport or bathroom reading at its best." Which is true enough. But it's also mildly informative and funny and charmingly written and brief. Recommended, in short, for the Seinfeld aficionado.

-- Debra Hamel

This book is a hysterically funny explanation of how the holiday Festivus was invented and observed by one very quirky family (whose experiences later inspired the Seinfeld "Festivus" episode written by the book's author). We learn that the origins of Festivus are even more bizarre and interesting than what we watched on Seinfeld!

This one is just plain laff out loud funny! The real life Festivus guy's life is so weird I don't know why he's not in a mental hospital. It reminds me a little of a David Sedaris book.

As a longtime "Seinfeld" fan I was compelled to buy this book to learn the true secrets behind the Festivus holiday. Written by Dan O'Keefe, one of the "Seinfeld" writers, this book details the story of the true holiday of Festivus, which his father originated in a pique of whimsy.

O'Keefe corrects the inaccuracies portrayed on the TV show (there was no pole, and there was a floating date, two name but two significant differences) and explains the actual holiday, which is vastly more screwed up than what viewers saw.

The book frequently made me laugh out loud. The non sequitur nature of O'Keefe's sense of humor comes through loud and clear (and makes it easy to envision why he was such a successful writer of comedy); the actual memories of his childhood and the Festivus celebration are both hilarious and enigmatically revealing.

There is a lot of bonus material throughout the book to include transcripts of some of the original "Festivus tapes" (which include many literary and cultural references, such as the famed "Tartar-Mongol Joke") as well as a linguistic history of the word "Festivus" which is not in any dictionary. O'Keefe does make special mention of the southeast Asian bumblebee, the "Bombus festivus" (or "Festivobombus" for those who do not prefer the genus-species name), as well as a fish from South America, the "Mesonauta festivus," which is described as a "'peaceful and graceful cichlid that deserves greater consideration...' and a 'timid fish that should be kept in a fairly tall aquarium.'" So there.

All told, this is a fun, entertaining, and highly quirky book which holds a lot of laughs, especially for "Seinfeld" fans.

As a fan of Seinfeld, I snagged this book in a bookstore outlet because of its obvious Seinfeld connection. I had hoped to learn more about the show or more about that episode, but such was not to be found in this book. To his credit, the author is extremely clear about the premise. This book is an obvious attempt to cash-in on the popularity of Seinfeld, but it quickly departs from any Seinfeld connections and enters the bizarre world of the O'Keefe family.

In short, the Festivus concept that appeared in one Seinfeld episode originated with the O'Keefe family. The author of this book was a writer for Seinfeld who introduced the idea into a script. The script for that episode took on a life of its own and quickly left the actual holiday that the O'Keefe family celebrated, so this book brings it back to that real, fake holiday.

Quite honestly, I didn't think that the book was very funny. The author is relatively clever, but his writing style is overly conversational and often profane. To be sure, there were a few laugh-out-loud moments, but they were too rare.

The worst part of the book is the transcripts. One of the hallmarks of the O'Keefe Festivus celebration was recording their conversations about the holiday. Much of this book is the actual transcripts of those recordings. Though this was probably a hoot for the O'Keefe family to relive, it just didn't resonate with me as interesting, funny, or worthwhile.

Ultimately, this book was a disappointment. Had I read the book jacket and description more closely, I could have discovered this fact. If you want to learn more about Seinfeld, this book won't do it. If you want to learn about the strange fake holiday that a random family celebrated in the 1970's and 1980's that ultimately inspired a general concept for a Seinfeld episode, then this is the book for you!!

If you're going to buy one Festivus book this year (and who isn't?) this is the one to get. It's written by the Seinfeld writer whose family created the holiday that eventually found its way to small screen immortality. It's the Festivus creation story. It's to Festivus what that story about the donkey and the manger and the angels and frankincense and stuff is to that other December holiday, only it totally isn't because Festivus isn't like that. Whatever. Just buy the book.

This book is hilarious and gives you the basic rules and regs and history of the great holiday of Festivus.
The bad thing is that about half the book is made up of stories just to fill enough pages to justify an entire book. You could probably get the same info from a page or two off the internet. The book is so short I read it in about an hour! It was funny though.