For the third year in a row my best friend and I pulled off a successful Festivus celebration. It is our heritage. It is who we are. Based on the holiday created by Frank Costanza in Seinfeld, we continually add to the tradition all sorts of funny extras. The most fun of this holiday is how very, very seriously we take it. People are instructed very carefully in the traditions and we don't allow any deviation. Our plan is to always add to and build up how insanely we carry out the festival.

Some of our unique traditions:

As with the original Festivus, we keep a broken clock in an opaque bag on the table. This year, none of the new participants even asked what was in the bag.

We set-up an arrivals area with food and drink, playing a CD full of covers of the song 99 Red Balloons in the background. When we're ready to enter the main room we drink champagne and sit down to re-watch the original episode that Festivus was born from.

The affair is a formal one - dresses for women and suits for men. We always make a point of saying "business casual is not acceptable."

Every year there is a host, who must be pined in a game of arm wrestling before we eat. The host is chosen according to who had to travel the farthest to attend the evening. The challengers go in order of weakest to strongest. Last year I was the host since I flew from Tel Aviv to New York. This year it was another friend of ours who came to Tel Aviv.

As we begin to eat, I am usually the one who recounts the story of how Festivus came about. This year we added a new tradition - the retelling of the telling of the greatest joke in the world. One time my friend was riding in a cab in Israel and, even though he understands Hebrew, the driver insisted on telling him what he considered to be the greatest joke in the world, and he insisted on doing so in English. My friend still has no idea what the joke means but trying to understand the punchline is a hilarious endeavor.

We also take the airing of grievances very seriously. Everyone must prepare grievances in advance, in writing, against everyone present - including those they've never met. To make the grievances go by smoother we do our best to get people drunk beforehand. For added excitement we also invite someone who attended a previous year but couldn't come now to deliver grievances through the speaker phone ("grievances live via satellite").

The menu is full of Seinfeld-inspired cuisine (anything that was ever in any episode) and everyone is given an assignment of what to bring. Mushroom Barley soup is always on the menu and, with Paco cooking in the kitchen, one lucky person always gets a rubber band in his or her soup.

At the end of the event there is a gift grab-bag. Everyone has to bring an inexpensive, Seinfeld-inspired gift. Re-gifting year after year is encouraged. And, of course, all the gifts go around the traditional pole.

A few days before Festivus we do a "pole raising" where the designated host takes the pole out of the crawl-space and leans it against the wall in the living room. This event is also adorned with champagne drinking, a re-watching of the episode and playing of the 99 Red Balloons cover CD.



UPDATE: I have now added many pertinent photos of our three past Festivus celebrations to my Flickr.com account. View my Festivus pictures!