‘FESTIVUS IS BACK!’ It is a cri de coeur that strikes terror into the heart of George Costanza and deep joy into the rest of us. For the irrepressible Frank – the father of Jerry Seinfeld’s best friend George – did one of the greatest things a man can do for his children: he created a Christmas tradition for them to live by.
Now admittedly Festivus – with its stark metal pole, its feats of strength and its annual airing of the grievances – failed to find much purchase beyond Seinfeld’s Costanza family (or, indeed, within it) but no matter. I’m team Frank all the way. I love creating and maintaining a holiday tradition. Back when we were tiny, our mum would get me and my brother and sister to write the menus for the Christmas lunch. I can see our scrawl still: “PRAWWN CAWKTAIL, TURKEY AND AWL THE TRIMMINGS”. A lifetime later, our tiny ones still write the menus on Christmas Day. But I feel you can never have enough family traditions. Here are a few I’ve created myself over the years...
The tree
The tree must go up on the first Sunday of December. I don’t know how we landed on this date, but there it is. The erecting of the tree will be followed by the first family viewing of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (there will be several more before the holidays are over) and we will all stride around saying “I DON’T KNOW, MARGO!”, “SHITTER’S FULL!” and “EAT MY RUBBER” for the rest of the day.
The Christmas drink with the lads
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Unusually for a man in late middle-age, I still have pretty much the same friendship group that I had in my teens, the guys I went to school with and played in bands with. Every Christmas we’ll all meet up in a designated pub back home and dust off the same anecdotes we’ve been sharing for 40 years now. These are all very much of the “do you remember the time X shit himself/crashed his dad’s car/threw up on his mum/whatever” variety, and I cannot tell you how good it is to hear them retold verbatim every year. Actually, as the years have passed and faces have begun to disappear from around that pub table, this tradition has begun to feel less and less pointless and more like a vital dram for the soul.
The dress code
Now this is a very tiny and stupid tradition indeed, but collar and tie are mandatory for gentlemen at Christmas lunch in our house. Why, John? Why on arguably the most informal day of the year – the day many of your Scottish brothers and sisters are not out of their pyjamas until lunch is served – are you insisting on dress codes that a Mayfair gentleman’s club might baulk at? Well, one Christmas more than 20 years ago I decided to put on a tie to lunch for a laugh: my young son wanted to copy me, someone else joined in and then we all did it again the following year. Now here we are two decades later. That’s right – in my book, once it happens two years running, it is officially a tradition and you best get with the damn programme.
Friends and family poker night
Again, like the ties, this one started randomly more than 20 years ago, was repeated the following year, and has – the pandemic aside – continued uninterrupted ever since. My now not-quite-so-young son, my former brother-in-law, and some friends of my wife’s all now feature as regular participants. On an agreed night somewhere in the perineum – the days between Boxing Day and New Year’s Eve – between six and 10 of us will gather around my kitchen table, I will cook (curry, boeuf bourguignon – lads’ food) and then we will enter a death match to see who can get drunkest and lose most money the fastest. Around 10pm, there will be the roast beef sandwiches. Around midnight I will beg to be allowed to smoke a cigar in the house just this once. I will be denied. Around 3am my son will win a gigantic pot of cash (last year the little bastard secured a winning fourth ace on the river, the final turn of the cards. In a western saloon a century ago he’d have been cheerfully gunned down on the spot) and we will all stagger to bed.
New tradition alert
This year, for the first time, I took my 17-year-old daughter to Selfridges to do our Christmas shopping. I don’t know if you’ve ever witnessed a teenage girl’s face as she beholds the absolute citadel of capitalism that is Selfridges the week before Christmas, but it is an experience I strongly recommend. Joy and awe fight for real estate on their astonished features. (You must, of course, perform this trip early on a weekday morning. Saturday afternoon at Selfridges in December would be lunacy.) Having completed our shopping by midday, I took her to the food hall, where we had a glass of champagne and split a thimble of caviar. I sat there, perfectly content as I watched her cheeks glow pink from the wine, and it dawned on me: Ah shit. I’ve done it again. Here is something I’m going to have to do every year for the rest of my life.
Because what are we really doing when we create traditions? We are trying to come up with something that might just live on beyond us. That our children might do with their children long after we are dead and gone. We imagine that, while they do it, we stand a chance of coming in from our cold, dark eternity and flickering across their hearts for a moment as they say: “Hey, remember the time dad shit himself/crashed the car/threw up on mum/whatever.” When I watch my kids writing those Christmas menus today – “PRAWWN CAWKTAIL, TURKEY AND AWL THE TRIMMINGS” – I am seeing an Ayrshire living room in the early 1970s, with my grandmother and grandfather and my dad and my brother and my aunts – all now dead – around it.
I am remembering the force, the quality of their laughter. The warmth of the room. The sheer number of presents. The abundance of food and drink. My baby sister crawls across the carpet. I am eight. I have nothing to worry about.
Festivus is back? You’re absolutely goddamn right, Frank.
Illustration by David Foldvari