Festivus Read Online Free Page B

need. Pour into the pot. Quickly insert the nail into the pot (with the sharp point first so that the party favor can’t be used as a weapon if the Grievance Airing gets out of hand) and hold it in place till the plaster dries. If you have made a sign, insert it immediately after you insert the nail. Hold both in place while the plaster dries.
    Tinsel
    Is Forbidden on Festivus. Too distracting, they say.
    The tinsel industry will survive the indignity, says Marcia Ceppos, owner of the Tinsel Trading Company in New York City. “Tinsel was used going back to the 1700s,” Ceppos notes. It’s still used now. Designers such as Ralph Lauren, Elie Tahari, and Nanette Lepore have sewn Ceppos’s tinsel into their recent clothing lines. Fly fishermen also use it to craft lures.
    Anyway, sighs Steven Soprano, store manager of Holiday Tree and Trim in Bayonne, New Jersey, the increasing number of people who celebrate the holidays with artificial trees have been shunning tinsel for years. With the natural trees people used in earlier eras, tinsel gets thrown away when the dried-out tree is tossed, requiring new tinsel to be purchased every year. But with fake trees that are reused annually, one application of tinsel last forever. “You put the stuff on there,” Soprano says, “it’s going to be a pain to take off there.”
    Soprano says he’s not scared of losing a few more tinsel sales to Festivus. “We may get stuck with the product,” he says, “but we’ll probably use it to decorate around here.”
    Festivus Cards
    For years, there were no commercially available Festivus cards, spurring regular folk to burst forth with creative greetings and party invitations. Eventually, Noble Works, a New Jersey-based gag card maker, had the idea to come out with a Festivus line. They used a dollop of content from the first edition of this book—and paid the author a pittance. Which is only fair since sales of the cards have only been “OK,” according to Noble Works owner Ron Kanfi. The company has done better with their other lines, such as one in which vegetables are pictured dressed up in human garb. A particular charmer shows an avocado staring at two ears of corn pictured on a computer screen. The caption: “Kevin spent the entire day downloading corn from the internet.”
    Hallmark has yet to weigh in on Festivus.

    Homespun Festivus Greetings
    The Human Fund, the Festivus Fruitcake, and other Gifts
    One of the attributes of Festivus is that there are no required gifts, no expected gifts, and, usually, no gifts at all.
    On the Festivus episode of
Seinfeld,
the character George Costanza dreams up a fake charity called The Human Fund as a way to give people he doesn’t care about a gift that costs him nothing. He hands office mates a card informing each that a donation has been made in his or her name to the fund. The card explains: “The Human Fund: Money for People.”
    Many real-world Festivites simply copy Costanza, handing out Human Fund cards. Others do give actual gifts. These have included used ChapSticks left in pockets from long-ago ski trips, balky handcuffs, and annoying talking dolls—all of which seem to establish a universal Festivus gift creed: Give only something you don’t want that you expect the recipient doesn’t want either.
    Nothing, of course, is considered more useless and unwanted than a fruitcake. Here is a card that the operator of one Festivus Web site has developed for elevating any regular fruitcake into a Festivus Fruitcake.

SECTION 3
    The Foods and Drinks of Festivus

    F un, surliness, and creativity: These apparent essences of twenty-first-century Festivus are on view in what the holiday sends to the stomach. Here are some recipes developed by the Festivus-forward and details about ongoing food fights, including the nasty Beer Wars of Festivus.
    Recipes
    The following four recipes, created for this book, were dreamed up, styled, photographed, and described by Anna Gershenson, a caterer in