Today is a Festivus for the rest of us! Get out tbe Festivus pole and prepare for the Feats of Strength and the Airing of Grievances!
Happy Festivus!
December 23 marks the famously anti-consumerist holiday, and this year is the 27th Festivus since it became a national holiday thanks to the Seinfeld episode “The Strike,” which aired on Dec. 18, 1997.
Before that, it was the invention and personal holiday of Daniel O’Keefe, a Reader’s Digest editor. His son Dan, a writer for Seinfeld, introduced Festivus to the rest of us by making it a focal point of the episode.
Festivus is enthusiastically celebrated at la casa de Buddy, providing Little Buddy the opportunity to engage in the Airing of Grievances and, as is tradition, tell everyone how they’ve disappointed him over the past year.
Buddy the Cat with George, Elaine, Jerry and Kramer in the season five episode “The Litter Box.” In the episode, Buddy, Kramer and Kramer’s friend Bob Saccamano scheme to charge felines entry to the beach, billing it as a “luxury litter box.”
With that, we’ll turn it over to Little Buddy’s list of Grievances. No one is spared.
Big Buddy: For being insufficiently devastated when I got sick a few months ago. I expected more tears. Do better next time.
PITB readers: It has recently come to my attention that some of you are laughing at me, not with me. This disturbing news has caused me to question whether you’re being honest when you send correspondence praising my ripped physique or insisting I should be president of the Americats again.
The Internet: For not making me as famous as I should be.
Big Buddy: For being a vegetarian and not having extra turkey in the house!
Big Buddy and PITB readers (again) for tolerating stories about non-cat species and cats who aren’t Buddy! Who cares about owls in Central Park and chonky cats in Poland? This is littlebuddythecat.com NOT fatpolishcats.com!
Six cats get in on the holiday spirit and tell us all about their participation in the seasonal festivities!
It’s a magical time of year when people spread cheer, give gifts, throw parties and generally act festive, often with the help of alcoholic beverages.
But Christmas, Hannukah and New Year’s aren’t just for humans! Felines are invited to join the festivities too. We found six kittens who look adorable wearing their ugly Christmas sweaters and asked them how their holidays are going so far:
Shadow
“‘Wear the sweater,’ she said. ‘It’ll look cute,’ she said. ‘People will love seeing you on our Christmas card!’ she said. I shall have my revenge soon enough.”
Bubbles
“I was told there would be snacks. If I don’t start seeing some Temptations soon, the claws are gonna come out!”
Creamy
“That eggnog stuff looks interesting. Pour a bowl for me, would you, human?”
Big Al
“They said I’d get coal in my stocking if I didn’t put the sweater on. Would Santa truly be so cruel?”
Timmy
“If you humans have to drink alcohol just to tolerate each other’s company, how do you think I feel? Crack out the catnip this instant!”
Nala
“I count 86 objects that could be swatted off that tree. You humans would do well to remember that.”
Buddy the Cat tours a trio of elegant box homes in the new season of HGTV’s popular series Box Hunters.
NEW YORK — Will he go with the “modest” 32-room castle, the manor with elegant cardboard balconies or the minimalist keep with high walls and strong fortifications?
Viewers of HGTV’s hit show, Box Hunters, will have to tune in on Wednesday, Dec. 13 to find out!
The episode will air on fHGTV, (Feline HGTV), the network’s cat-centric sister station, and will follow Buddy the Cat as his box estate agent shows him three unique properties.
“Buddy the Cat is a young professional whose hobbies include taking over the world, gorging on turkey and getting high on catnip,” the narrator says in the episode’s opening sequence. “He’s looking for a property that will fit in his living room, can accommodate a nuclear bunker and serve as a headquarters for planning world domination, all while providing pleasant spaces to entertain guests. Can he find a box house that will fit his criteria? Find out in this episode of Box Hunters!”
Like many cats who are featured on the show, Buddy has a predetermined list of features he considers absolutely necessary, including a complete lack of doors, no baths, and quiet napping chambers.
“It has to have a certain je ne sais quoi as a dwelling meant for me and not just some regular cat, of course,” Buddy said. “But it needn’t be unnecessarily elaborate.”
Patches, the box estate agent, told Buddy they’d “start with something modest” while leading him to a towering box castle with a grand staircase and wide front entrance.
A modest box castle design toured by Buddy the Cat.
“I like the understated design of this one,” Buddy said. “The ground floor entrance leads directly into the Grand Napping Chamber with smaller, more private napping accommodations accessible from the main chamber.”
Patches nodded.
“And you can see here, the litter box room is filled with all the modern amenities, including a pad that catches stray litter and a cardboard floor designed to look like marble,” she said. “Stepping out into the grand foyer, we have ample storage space in the adjoining closets for all your toys, your catnip stash and your weapons. It’s even got a Roomba garage!”
A second design, which Patches labeled “more of a classically styled castle,” features a pair of ground-level entrances, several balconies, and “ample space for walking the upper parapets.”
“The wrought cardboard filigrees are fabulous,” Buddy said, running a paw along a faux window where dozens of holes had been punched through to create a screen effect.
Finally they toured a minimalist keep that filled most of Buddy’s requirements but didn’t have all the bells and whistles.
“The good news is, it’s significantly less than your budget of 50 cans of wet food,” Patches said. “You’ll have cans left over for renovations and to customize the space. And moving along here past the master naproom, this doorway leads out to the central courtyard. This is a really nice space for entertaining, especially in the summer months when it’s warm out and you and your friends might want to dine outside on kibble, turkey, mouse or whatever your preference may be.”
Catch the full episode on Wednesday, Dec. 13 at 7:30 p.m.!
It’s a one-off with the possibility of more for my niece who “loves kitties!”
My niece is six years old and she “loves kitties!”
Unfortunately she’s allergic to cats. Hopefully her allergies become less severe with time as mine did and she can adopt a cat at some point, but until then she has to settle for admiring felines at a distance and occasionally petting Buddy.
Even though my niece can’t have a cat of her own I can still encourage her love of cats, so I made a cat t-shirt for her as one of her Christmas gifts this year:
I’m using the same image for February in Buddy’s Meownificent 2024 Catlendar, which should be available soon. I’ll post the link when it’s live on Redbubble.
This is now the second t-shirt with my custom artwork featuring cats. I have a t-shirt of the photoshop image I created of Bud playing basketball:
The print came out surprisingly well, but in the future I’m going to stick with artwork rather than composites of photographs/photoshops like this one, for the simple fact that the simpler color schemes and cleaner lines work better on t-shirts than photographs.
A Festivus for the rest of us who reject the relentless commercialization of the holidays.
Are you fed up with the relentless commercialization of the holiday season? Take heart: You’re not alone!
The late Jerry Stiller, in his iconic role as Seinfeld‘s Frank Costanza, explained the origin of his anti-consumerist celebration in a now-infamous 1997 episode titled “The Strike“:
“Many Christmases ago I went to buy a doll for my son. I reached for the last one they had, but so did another man. As I rained blows upon him, I realized there had to be another way … Out of that, a new holiday was born. A Festivus for the rest of us!”
On the surface Festivus — celebrated annually on Dec. 23 — looks like any other family gathering for the holidays, but the details make it special. They include a Festivus pole instead of a tree, the Feats of Strength — in which a younger relative attempts to pin the family patriarch — and the Airing of Grievances:
“At the Festivus dinner, you gather your family around, and you tell them all the ways they have disappointed you over the past year,” Frank explains.
Festivus is completely absurd, which is what makes it fun, but it’s also a strong reaction against the all-encompassing commercialization of the holiday season. Every year it seems like the retail industry nudges the season a little further back. At first it was a few weeks, then the end of Thanksgiving marked the beginning of the holidays.
Now it’s not unusual to see lights, wreaths and images of Santa popping up in early November, setting the tone for more sales, more gifts, and more spending.
Of course if you’re reading this site, you’re a cat lover and you’re probably intimately familiar with the non-stop meowing of a dissatisfied cat. Not enough food, not enough snacks, not enough space on the bed, not enough scritches. To a cat, the Airing of Grievances can take place on any day of the year — and it often does. But that doesn’t mean there can’t be a special edition of it on Festivus.
Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for me to sit down to the Festivus table and get berated by Bud. I’m told his list of grievances is quite long this year.
Pain In The Bud 