December 23 is, of course, Festivus, the holiday “for the rest of us.”
While popularized by “Seinfeld,” it was actually invented decades earlier by a magazine editor, Dan O’Keefe.
O’Keefe spent 30-some years at Reader’s Digest. A 1978 issue lists him on the masthead as a senior editor. John Heidenry, in his book “Theirs Was the Kingdom: Lila and DeWitt Wallace and the Story of the Reader’s Digest,” refers to him as a senior staff editor in the 1980s, a notch up in the Digest hierarchy.
“Perhaps the most eccentric of the Younger Turks in Pleasantville was Dan O’Keefe, described by one associate as ‘a sophomore science nerd — very bright but painfully shy,’” Heidenry writes. “He was also widely regarded as [John] Wulp’s successor as resident intellectual, a man with strange interests in things like magic and philosophy…”
O’Keefe’s son, also a Dan, brought the Festivus concept to “Seinfeld,” where he was a writer. It made its debut in a December 1997 episode.
The elder O’Keefe told The New York Times in 2004 that he’d come up with the idea and celebrated the first Festivus in 1966. It evolved through the 1970s, becoming an O’Keefe family tradition.
“In the background was Durkheim’s ‘Elementary Forms of Religious Life,’ saying that religion is the unconscious projection of the group,” he explained to the Times, sounding very much like the man Heidenry described. “And then the American philosopher Josiah Royce: religion is the worship of the beloved community.”
O’Keefe died on 2012 at age 84. Festivus lives on.
