John Lucas

Today is Festivus! Which gives me another opportunity to feature some non-Christmas holiday music.

“But John,” I hear you saying, “Festivus is a made-up holiday!”

That is correct. All holidays are made up.

“But John,” I hear you saying, “Festivus was just made up for a TV sitcom!”

Not so, dear reader. Festivus was certainly popularized when it appeared as a plot point in “The Strike”, a 1997 episode of Seinfeld. However, it was actually invented decades earlier, in 1966, by Daniel O’Keefe, an American writer and editor, to commemorate his first date with his wife three years earlier.

The rest of the world would probably never have heard of Festivus if O’Keefe’s son, Dan, hadn’t grown up to become a television writer. Dan, you may have guessed by now, wrote “The Strike”, and he incorporated his father’s made-up holiday, complete with its “feats of strength” and “airing of grievances”, into the episode.

Festivus has since become an almost-real celebration observed by possibly dozens of people. Perhaps more. So I set out to find actual Festivus songs to mark the occasion. This was no easy task.

Beloved indie singer-songwriter and violinist Andrew Bird included a track called “Festivus” on his 2023 album Outside Problems…but it’s an instrumental.

There are also a number of Festivus songs on YouTube with not-so-thinly veiled anti-Christmas lyrics, but those are tiresome and not worth posting here. They also don’t have actual videos, so that’s also disqualifying.

But then I found this song, which not only draws most of its lyrics directly from the Seinfeld episode, but also kind of has a video. That’s something! And here it is: