Jerry Seinfeld Calls for Major Change To Festivus Holiday for 2020

We are deep in the holiday season right now. Hanukkah recently ended, Christmas is coming up in just a couple of days as is Kwanzaa, but today, Wednesday, December 23rd, marks a different sort of holiday. We’re talking, of course, about Festivus. The holiday, whose popularity was born out of a now-iconic episode of Seinfeld, is traditionally celebrated on this date each year as an alternative to pretty much everything that is Christmas complete with the “Airing of Grievances” but given the, well, 2020 of it all Jerry Seinfeld is calling for a major change to the holiday festivities this year.

On Twitter, Seinfeld suggested to followers that “Maybe just this once, just for this Festivus 2020, we take pass on the ‘Airing of Grievances’.”

Seinfeld might be onto something. The “Airing of Grievances” part of the Festivus celebration generally takes place right after dinner has been served and is a time when you gather your loved ones around and tell them all the ways they’ve disappointed you over the past year. If you had a problem with someone during the past year, this was the time to let them know. With 2020 having been a difficult and a divisive year, Seinfeld may be onto something when it comes to sitting this year’s Airing of Grievances out. No word on whether we’ll just be skipping ahead to Feats of Strength but given social distancing and other COVID-19 related things this holiday, it’s probably not a good idea to wrestle the head of the household to the floor via Zoom.

As for Festivus itself, while the holiday is fake — it’s become largely a creation of popular culture thanks to the popularity of Seinfeld — it has real-life roots, thanks to Dan O’Keefe, the writer of the episode it appears in, 1997’s “The Strike”. It turns out that Festivus was a fake holiday his father made up to celebrate an anniversary.

“It is a fake holiday my dad made up in the ’60s to celebrate the anniversary of his first date with my mother, and it was something that we celebrated as a family in a very peculiar way through the ’70s, and then I never spoke of it again,” O’Keefe told UPROXX. “I had actually forgotten about it because I had blotted it out of my mind.”

It was Dan’s younger brother that spilled the beans on the holiday, thus causing the domino effect that led to its inclusion in the show.

“At the time I was just a terrified staff writer hoping that this episode wouldn’t let everyone in America know that my family suffers from mental illness,” O’Keefe said. “Each Festivus had a theme, which were always depressing. One was, ‘Is there light at the end of the tunnel?’ ‘Are we too easily made glad?’ was one, I believe. My grandmother died the next year and it was ‘A Festivus for the Rest of Us,’ meaning the living and not the departed. It’s pretty god**** weird.”

What do you think? Should we skip Airing of Grievances this year? Let us know in the comments.