Festivus 2025: The airing of grievances

I've got a lot of problems with you people!

Lo, I bring good tidings! It’s the eve of Festivus, the holiday for the rest of us.

“Happy Festivus for the rest of us”: a handmade sign by $paradisethepoet resting against a parking-lot fence in Oakland. Photo: Nancy Friedman.

Here’s what I wrote about Festivus last year:

Festivus, traditionally celebrated on December 23, was invented by Seinfeld writer Dan O’Keefe and introduced to the world in 1997, during the series’ ninth season. As madeupical holidays go, it’s proved to be remarkably durable, perhaps because its traditions are so basic and universal: an unadorned aluminum pole, some Feats of Strength, and best of all The Airing of Grievances.

Watch the story of Festivus.

The Festivus pole. As Frank Costanza (Jerry Stiller) told us: “I find tinsel distracting.”

I’ll be observing as many Festivus rituals as I can, beginning with a Feat of Strength (a swim in San Francisco Bay sans wetsuit) and ending with a “modest” meal (no meatloaf for me, but I’ve found some peas in my freezer). And I’m getting a running start on the holiday’s centerpiece: the Airing of Grievances.

Oy, do I have grievances! For your sake and mine, I’m limiting my list this year to just two big ones.

Grievance #1: Generation names.

This may be hard for some of you to believe, but people didn’t always label themselves generationally. In fact, through much of the 20th century generational labels were rare and had little to do with year of birth; they were instead generated (so to speak) by war or literature. Spain’s Generation of ’98 was a group of modernist writers and thinkers influenced by Spain’s territorial losses in the Spanish-American War. The American expatriate poet Gertrude Stein is said to have come up with Lost Generation to describe the post–World War I cohort of disillusioned, directionless young people; the label was popularized by Ernest Hemingway, who used it in the epigraph of his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises: “You are all a lost generation.” “Beat Generation,” which first appeared in print in 1952, is usually credited to the writer Jack Kerouac, who applied it to the poets, artists, and musicians he associated with in San Francisco. Their birth years? Immaterial.

Then, in 1980, Landon Y. Jones wrote a book about the large cohort of young adults who’d been born between the end of World War II and the early 1960s. He wanted the title to be Baby Boom, but his publisher told him that no one would know what it meant and that confused booksellers would shelve the book in the child-care section. So, Jones later recalled, “I titled the book ‘Great Expectations’ (Dickens be damned), tucking ‘the baby boom generation’ into the subtitle.”

We all know what happened next.

Still, “Baby Boomers” might have been the end of it if Douglas Coupland (born in 1961) hadn’t published a 1991 novel titled Generation X. That term had already been tried out to describe the generation growing up after World War II (later called the Silent Generation) and British youth in the 1960s. Coupland took his title not from those predecessors but from a chapter in Paul Fussell’s 1983 book Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, in which “X” described “people who wanted to hop off the merry-go-round of status, money, and social climbing that so often frames modern existence, as Coupland wrote in 1995. “The citizens of X had much in common with my own socially disengaged characters; hence the title.”

And then, Coupland lamented, “the marketing began.”

Marketers gotta market. What’s strange to me is how eagerly the objects of the marketing accepted their pigeonholing. We now have not only a never-ending slicing and dicing of age groups but a fierce and, I submit, baffling attachment to age-group labels.

Why baffling? For starters, I cannot ever remember what “Gen X” or “Millennial” or “Gen Z” or any of those other terms actually means. What does a “Boomer” born in 1946 (e.g., Donald J. Trump) have in common with a “Boomer” born in 1959 (e.g., Emma Thompson)?¹ Is a “Gen Xer” 50 years old? 60? Who cares? Also: WTF is an “elder millennial”? A “zillennial”? Is there really a “Generation Alpha”? And what comes next?

It’s not only the fuzziness. (If you’re 36 years old, just tell me! Don’t make me do calculations!) It’s the insistence that these labels mean something: that by declaring your generational bona fides you’re automatically granted membership in a tribe with its own folkways and habits.

I’m not buying it. When I encounter a sentence that begins “As a Millennial . . .” I stop reading. It’s about as significant to me as “As a Sagittarius . . .” which is to say, not significant at all and pretty silly to boot. Yes, many people born in 1965 (or 1989 or late April) may share some memories and experiences. But to attach your whole identity to an invented label based on arbitrary demographics is as lazy and unhelpful as the pseudoscience of phrenology (or astrology).

Douglas Coupland said something wise about this in a 2021 essay for The Guardian:

The false assumption of human sameness is a key ingredient in generational discussions, because without it, you can’t demonise younger people – and there’s a ton of money to be made from demonising the young.

Down with generational tags! Don’t consent to being a statistic in a cohort! Be your own unique self, no matter when you happened to be born.

Grievance #2: “Heritage Americans” vs. “paperwork Americans.”

This is another example of demographic labeling. And it isn’t just annoying: It’s appalling and alarming and dangerous.

“Happy Festivus for the rest of us”: a sign affixed to a tent in one of my neighborhood’s sidewalk encampments, just opposite the fence pictured above. Photo: Nancy Friedman.

I am an American, Los Angeles born (to paraphrase Saul Bellow), but according to a rising and vocal contingent of my compatriots that doesn’t give me a legitimate claim to citizenship, because I am not a “heritage American”: All of my immediate ancestors arrived on these shores between the 1890s and 1932; all of them had to learn English once they arrived.

Here’s what self-described “paleoconservative” Auron MacIntyre had to say, approvingly, about “heritage Americans” on an August episode of Tucker Carlson’s podcast:

“You could find their last names in the Civil War registry,” MacIntyre explained. This ancestry matters, he said, because America is not “a collection of abstract things agreed to in some social contract.” It is a specific set of people who embody an “Anglo-Protestant spirit” and “have a tie to history and to the land.” MacIntyre continued: “If you change the people, you change the culture.” “All true,” Carlson replied.

(Of course, under these criteria our current president would be ineligible for citizenship: His mother immigrated from Scotland in 1930 and his paternal grandfather came to the U.S. from Bavaria in 1885, two decades after the end of the Civil War.)

Writing in The Atlantic in October, Ali Breland pointed out the larger implications (gift link):

That same phrase—heritage American—has been rippling across the right, particularly on the social web. Politicians have started flirting with the idea as well. During a speech at the Claremont Institute in July, Vice President J. D. Vance said that “people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong,” referring to those on the “modern left” who conceive of American identity “purely as an idea.” And here’s Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri at the National Conservative Conference last month: “We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian Pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith.” America, Schmitt said, is “our birthright. It’s our heritage, our destiny.”

An publication called American Reformer, founded in 2021, spells it out even more bluntly:

What does it mean to be an American? Heritage America is best understood as involving seven inheritances: the English language, Christianity, self-government, Christian government, liberty, equality under the law, and relationship with the physical land.

That leaves me out on at least two counts. And maybe you as well.

If not “heritage Americans,” what are we? There’s a ready response: “Paperwork Americans.”

Remember Auron MacIntyre? He decries the idea of America as a “propositional nation” defined “by a set of abstract principles.” He scoffs at that idea:

According to this view, anyone who completes the paperwork and swears an oath is just as American as someone whose ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War.

“Paperwork Americans,” MacIntyre intones, “are not your countrymen.”

Yes, he’s talking about immigrants.

You know who else despised “paperwork” citizens, using exactly that language? That’s right: Adolf Hitler. Here’s James Lindsay, host of the New Discourses podcast, on September 29, 2025:

Of course, the Nazi State had its conception of citizenship, as would any state, but rather than breaking down its population into “citizens” and “aliens,” Hitler wanted there to be three statuses: German citizens, subjects of the state, and foreigners (or aliens). In the shortest chapter of Mein Kampf, he makes the case that birthright citizenship and naturalization “by paperwork” are “insane” policies that “poison” the nation.

But the United States is not Germany. What has made us rare from the beginning, and still rare today, is that the U.S. has always been a propositional nation, dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal,” and not predicated on the “blood and soil” ethos of European states.

You won’t often find me quoting Ronald Reagan, but he did say something true and laudable in his final speech as U.S. president:

I think it’s fitting to leave one final thought, an observation about a country which I love. It was stated best in a letter I received not long ago. A man wrote me and said: “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”

Whether that was Reagan’s actual belief or the noble words of a speechwriter, it’s what many of us Americans were taught to believe. The notion that it’s being challenged is chilling indeed.

Happy Festivus to all!²

1. What does Donald J. Trump have in common with anyone?

2. Under the circumstances.