If the truth is stranger than fiction, which is stranger still: fiction about the truth or truth about fiction? And how could we even hope to tell one from the other?

In the TV series Seinfeld, George Costanza said he feared persecution because of his family’s celebration of Festivus, the invented holiday of his father’s creation – a backlash against the commercialization and stress of Christmas. Of course, fans of the show might remember Costanza was exploiting the holiday to cover up for about $20,000 in charity fraud.

It might not rise to the level of true persecution, but Rob Marshall is getting real-life grief over his celebration of the fictional holiday. Most people who drive by his son’s Englewood residence don’t think twice about Marshall’s Festivus displays, but to some, it’s just another shot in the so-called “War on Christmas.”

Festivus does have a certain hint of stripping down the time-honored Christmas symbols and traditions. Rather than a Christmas tree glittering with decorations and lights, the Festivus family gathers around a bare aluminum pole – a prop chosen by George Costanza’s father Frank for its simplicity and high strength-to-weight ratio. Rather than the exchange of presents, a family gathered around the Festivus pole goes through the Airing of Grievances, where each member tells the others the various ways he or she has been disappointed by the rest of them. And forget caroling. The night of Festivus is closed with the Feats of Strength – the ritual wrestling and pinning down the head of the household. The holiday brings a cold, stark contrast to the spectacle of Christmas and if you’re the type to fight tooth and nail over even the secular traditions, it’s no surprise someone got mad.

“We’ve gotten some flack from religious conservatives,” Marshall said. “They take themselves way too seriously, evangelicals.” None of it has risen beyond the level of angry e-mails and phone messages, but he contends “for every one you actually get, there’s a hundred more people thinking the same thing.” Is Marshall, the self-described “old counterculture guy from the ‘60s” paranoid?

Maybe not. In a war that’s relatively new, if it even exists in your eyes, Marshall already earned his stripes in the Happy Holidays Battle of Dec. 18. Marshall’s Christian nonprofit organization Road Home Concerts put on a benefit at the Gothic Theater billed as a “holiday concert,” to help Healing Waters International, a charity that helps poor, developing countries get access to water purification systems. “We even got nailed for that, believe it or not,” he said.

Marshall celebrated Festivus on the accepted date of Dec. 23 with his son and friends, members of Englewood ska-punk band The Haggardies, down to the pole, the grievances and feats. But outside of the novelty of it all, there was no attack on Christmas. If anything, as friends and family had fun together, Festivus was the common thread between the sacred and the secular.