The Festivus Meditations

2017--2025

By Lucius Hyde-White and Swami Scabbers

Every year, Lucius Hyde-White and Swami Scabbers record a much-anticipated radio address for Festivus. Lucius, the master of ceremonies, introduces the Swami at length, with feeling, and at the Swami’s expense. The Swami, too high-minded for elaborate preparation, sermonizes for a time with perilous spontaneity, and then together they enact the Festivus passion plays that have won them renown throughout squishdom and plushdom alike for their entertaining and illuminating literary, dramatic and moral qualities.

The festivities over the nine-year period covered by this volume include: instruction in a meditation technique distinct from crocheting; a ghost story in which visiting spirits sell vacuum cleaners; a poetaster’s sea ballad interrupted by messages from sponsors; the Prince of Flushing urged by his father’s ghost toward something beginning with “R” (seven letters); two companions waiting on an undone potato; a detective on the trail of a fiend smashing the city’s Napoleon pastries; a vampire negotiating for a split-level with a crypt; a djinn itemizing which parts of his captives he means to remove; and a hard-boiled private eye hired to recover a plain black eggcup dating from Fabergé’s “form follows function” period.

These short, incisive radio plays are a furry tribute to festive fellowship—seasonal literature for the rest of us.