What I do celebrate is the best wishes, the kind thoughts, the good will, the yearning for peace, and hope for the future so many cultures share and express as we pass through this season.
I wish you all health, joy, peace, prosperity, and a joyous celebration - whatever it is you celebrate - in this holiday and in the coming year.
Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasion and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all. I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the generally accepted calendar year 2007, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great. Not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country nor the only America in the Western Hemisphere. And without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wishes. By accepting these greetings you are accepting these terms. This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal. It is freely transferable with no alteration to the original greeting. It implies no promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for herself or himself or others, and is void where prohibited by law and is revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher. This wish is warranted to perform as expected within the usual application of good tidings for a period of one year or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday greeting, whichever comes first, and warranty is limited to replacement of this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the wisher.
in 10 years it’ll end around the fourth of July… crazy lunar calendar…
anyway, tis the season to exercise kindness and compassion to your fellow sentient beings. if you live in a cold climate, be kind to those who have no warmth or shelter; if you live in a warm climate, be kind to the tourists
It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
And in despair I bowed my head;
“There is no peace on earth,” I said:
“For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead; nor doth He sleep!
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men!”
I wish the earth had “System Restore” on it.
Maybe it does. It’s hard to imagine all the
power struggles that are taking place. Humans
love combat, I guess, whether verbal or physical,
or sometimes both, and sometimes all the time.
I don’t know that they love combat so much.
I think they like to be better than any other and the only way to ultimately prove that is through combat.
Blame it on species-wide bad self-image.
But I do like the System Restore concept. We need a celestial back-up hard drive.
‘Seinfeld’ spurs Festivus pole sales
By DINESH RAMDE, Associated Press Writer
Yesterday at 5:43 pm
Kevin Campanella hates buying and receiving Christmas presents that he says inevitably disappoint. This year, no such worries.
Campanella plans to seek “serenity now” by celebrating Festivus, a wacky holiday popularized in a 1997 “Seinfeld” episode. Billed as “Festivus for the rest of us,” the holiday celebrated by the Costanza clan on Dec. 23 features an airing of grievances and feats of strength in which a guest must pin the host before the party ends.
In protest of Christmas’ commercialism, character Frank Costanza puts up an unadorned aluminum pole instead of a tree. The metal, he says admiringly, has a “very high strength-to-weight ratio.”
“I just always loved that episode,” said Campanella, 28, a landscaper from Warwick, R.I. “But it’s not so much about the show — I think the idea of Festivus is a good idea.”
So does The Wagner Companies. The Milwaukee-based maker of hand-railing components is bringing back its line of Festivus poles for the holiday season. The company had plenty of metal rails on hand already and 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,” said Tony Leto, the firm’s executive vice president of sales and marketing. “But in many ways, Festivus is taking on a life of its own.”
Wagner, which made $15 million last year from products including handrail brackets and pipe elbows, earned only a few thousand dollars from Festivus pole sales. Leto said the company received some media publicity upon launch of the poles but he credits bloggers with strong “Seinfeld” loyalties for spreading the news far and wide.
Wagner sold about 250 poles in 2005, with around 100 sales coming from the firm’s 120 employees. This season, it sold about 300 poles by mid-December and was on pace to sell twice that number by Saturday, said Leto, whose claim to fame is that he shared a drama class with Jerry Seinfeld at Queens College in New York.
Wagner offers a 6-foot Festivus pole for $38 and a 2-foot-8-inch tabletop model for $30. The setup is simple: a hollow pipe, 1.9 inches in diameter, inserted into a collapsible aluminum base.
Re Festivus, just today I happened to learn a few interesting things about this Seinfeldian Solstice Celebration, to wit:
The writer of that episode actually based it on his own life experience. (Wow, all those creative writing teachers are right after all!). His own father created a holiday called Festivus and subjected his family to it for years as he was growing up. When he let this fact slip to his fellow Seinfeld writers, they insisted he build an episode around it.
That episode writer, Dan O’Keefe (distant relative of Padraig, perhaps?) is Irish American, as is his father who created the holiday. Hmm, does this mean I should be posting this instead on the Irish Traditional Music Forum, being that Festivus is now revealed to be both Irish and traditional (two generations is traditional, right?) and there is presumably music involved?
You can read all about it on this discussion on the Washington Post web site (although you may have to register there to do so):
There’s also apparently a book by the guy about all this, which you can get on Amazon. Could be a great stocking stuffer for that special someone!
Finally, let me caution everyone against using that nice new low whistle or flute as your Festivus pole. It could get mangled during the feats of strength. Although a Seery or M&E Delrin flute might be okay, I suppose…
