Local newspaper celebrates made up ‘Seinfeld’ holiday Festivus by publishing grievances
"What did strangers, family members, sports teams, your boss, your pets, your dentist, your local supermarket do to aggravate you in 2021?"
A local newspaper is celebrating the fictional Seinfeld holiday Festivus, encouraging people to write in with complaints.
The Tampa Bay Times has published their sixth annual prompt for readers to submit letters to celebrate Festivus.
In ‘The Strike’, an episode of Seinfeld released in 1997, Jerry Stiller’s Frank Constanza makes up an anti-consumerist holiday called Festivus, which the publication has taken inspiration from.
“What did strangers, family members, businesses, sports teams, your boss, your pets, your dentist, your local supermarket — anyone or anything — do to aggravate you in 2021?” they wrote.
“Tell us your top complaints via this form, and we’ll publish them (for everyone to deal with!) in our sixth annual Festivus airing of grievances.”
Readers can submit their complaints here via an anonymous form, while the top complaints of previous years are listed here, here and here.
Seinfeld, which starred Jerry Seinfeld as a fictionalised version of himself, ran for nine seasons in the 1990s.
All 180 episodes of the show arrived on Netflix for US viewer earlier this year, and fans took to Twitter to point out a number of key jokes have now been ruined because of the 16:9 remastering of the episodes.
One example was the season eight episode “The Pothole” when the actual pothole which forms a key joke with character George Costanza, is cut out entirely.
One fan called the crop “unwatchable” while another said it had “ruined” the viewing experience. Many also compared it to what Disney+ did to episodes of The Simpsons when they too altered the aspect ratio, cutting out key jokes.
