Heck Of A Guy

This is the third and final post of the sequence, “Putting All 3 C’s Back In Christmas,” begun 28 November 2006 with I’ll Have A Blue (Springs) Christmas and continued yesterday with Papa Christmas. Today’s focus is on an exemplar of the third C in Christmas, Commercialism.

As I noted when I began this online holiday triptych, I make a concerted effort every year to constrain my sarcasm and complaints about the means by which folks choose to celebrate the season, and that includes the mercantile traditions of buying low, selling high, and inducing the rest of us to participate as consumers.

And, I am trying.

But I beseech the merchants of Christmas, Give me a break

I’ve acclimated to Christmas decorations being displayed and seasonal items placed on sale concurrently with Fourth of July fireworks and picnic supplies. I’ve adjusted to the incessant blaring of tape loops of carols. I can handle Santa’s reindeer mingling with the other animals around Baby Jesus’ cradle ($83.99 at Target, today only) while the shepherds chat up Kris Kringle. Heck, I even tolerate that product placement deal the Wise Men cut with the precious metals and incense commodities folks.

But there is one Christmas-specific TV commercial that is so egregiously outrageous that its existence concurrent with the absence of street riots or calls for public lynching of the responsible advertising executives can only mean that the TiVo fast forward function and similar conveniences to bypass noxious television ads are ubiquitously available.

I’M TALKING TO YOU, HALLMARK

Hallmark’s featured product for Christmas 2006 is the Very Merry Trio, AKA Evil Incarnate.

Consider this description lifted directly from Hallmark’s own site,

Triple your family’s holiday merriment with our Very Merry Trio. As the Santa-capped snowman dances and sings, his perky penguin pals join right in—twitching their tails and flapping their flippers in a jaunty jingle-bell jam. Twinkling tree lights top off the fun. … A jolly snowman dances and sings to Hallmark’s version of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” while his two penguin pals chime in, waving and wagging the festive bells on their fins and tails to the rhythm of the music, and Christmas lights twinkle to the tune. Consumers may purchase the Very Merry Trio for $14.95 with each purchase of three Hallmark cards.

Does that sound like fun – a snowman dancing while two penguin twitch, flap, and wag to Hallmark’s own arrangement of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” in a “jaunty jingle-bell jam?” … while lights on the tree flash on and off?

Well, I suppose if your idea of fun is inducing a seizure, …

In case anyone has somehow escaped the spectacle, a video of the Very Merry Trio in action can be viewed

• Via this link to the Hallmark site: Hallmark Very Merry Trio Video
• Or via this embedded video player: Media: Very Merry Trio Airport Ad
• Or via this link to YouTube:  Hallmark Christmas

But an over the top, holiday-themed, electronic music box is, at most, an aesthetic issue, not a rant-triggering problem. The rant-triggering problem is

The Bizarro Commercial

No one is more disposed than DrHGuy to willingly suspend disbelief.

Parallel universes as a plot device?
- No sweat.

A denouement dependent on time travel?
- Love it.

TV sitcoms populated by sexy, incredibly attractive, smart women married to or hopelessly enamored of fat, unattractive, not so bright guys in low-paying jobs (or movies with the same women falling for Woody Allen)?
- Sounds right to me.

Movies about athletes who win the big game, assisted by ghosts who are deadly from the 3-point line?
– Why not?

But I do have my limits – and Hallmark’s television ad for the Very Merry Trio has violated them.

The Script

The scene is the O’HareDullesAtlantaLaGuardiaDenverLAX Airport. All of the obviously weary travelers react with glum frustration to the announcement that the flight has been delayed by two hours – that is, everyone except a mother with small children draped around her, languishing.¹

Instead of despairing, Mom reaches in her bag …

I’m going to interrupt the narrative to ask, what, gentle reader, would you guess such an individual might pull from her bag were this a real life situation?

As the most likely choice, I’m going with the classic – drugs. I’m thinking low-potency narcotic tablets she’s hoarded for just such an occasion from the time her physician prescribed them for post-biopsy pain eight months ago; I would not, however, rule out a kit with syringe, needles, swabs, sterile water, filter, tourniquet, a clean spoon, and a couple of jumbos she picked up on the way to the airport. She does, after all, have to deal with those kids.

A close second would be the key to the airport locker where she stashed her Glock 17.

Other possibilities would include 28 of those tiny airplane bottles of booze, a couple of child-sized ball gags, a cattle prod, and various Zen trance-inducing devices. And, oh I suppose it’s theoretically possible that she could have a book, a MP3 player, snacks, cash, etc.

On the other hand, I could consider it unlikely that she would have packed in her carry-on bag, let alone be searching for (1) any of the items listed in that “Twelve Days Of Christmas” song, (2) a live rhinoceros, or (3) a Very Merry Trio.

Well, she doesn’t have ten lords a-leaping or a live rhinoceros in her bag.

Not only does she pull out the Very Merry Trio, but she switches it on, adding its afore mentioned “jaunty jingle-bell jam” to the cacophony of the airport.

At this point, your thought is no doubt identical to mine,

For God’s sake, someone protect the children from the mob²

… because a group of delayed travelers stuck in an airport is, sure as shootin’ (and there may be some shooting), going to attack the next person or thing that inflicts further misery.

But the Age Of Aquarius. not Armageddon, ensues.

Everyone in the airport is mesmerized by the dancing, wagging, flapping, twitching noisemaker.³ In fact, when the plane finally arrives and is ready for boarding, the crowd can’t bear leaving the still playing Very Merry Trio.

And no one is happier than our heroine, the Hallmark Mother, who was the most despondent character in the opening scene.

This is your mom

This is your mom — high on Hallmark

My question for the Hallmark folks is, “What color is the sky in the world where you live?”

It Could Be Worse

What could be worse than hating this gizmo? Having a child who loves it, that’s what.

Consider Abi, the blogger at I’ll get you, my witty, a site I happened onto while researching this piece. Abi, who – and you’ll have to trust me on this – seems in many ways, a quite sentient and humane woman – nonetheless declares,

It’s [The Very Merry Trio is] adorable, and it adds a fresh twist to the cacophony created by simultaneously playing every singing toy in our home.

That Abi looks at the Very Merry Trio and thinks, “adorable” while I think “this might be just the thing to wring information from those Gitmo prisoners who shrug off waterboarding” is, again, only a matter of taste.⁴ She goes on, however, to describe this doomsday scenario in her post, the auspiciously named   It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like a Crisis, part II:

This is David’s [her 3 year old son's] favorite holiday pastime, a tradition that he’s now handing down to his younger brother: to line up all the singing, dancing, jingling decorations we own and push all their buttons, creating sweet sounds rivaled only by tossing the entire Mormon Tabernacle Choir in a blender and pressing “liquefy.”

We’ll see how long we can hold out before we remove all the batteries and throw them away, or box ourselves up, dejectedly, along with the war-weary Thanksgiving decorations – letting the holly and the ivy, the nutcrackers and angels and Santas and snowmen and reindeer and silver bells, have the house to themselves, to loot and plunder and blink festively until Valentine’s Day.

Yikes.

Yet, Abi’s situation, which is Beginning to Look a Lot Like a Crisis to me, too, may contain the key to

The Solution

Fixing the Hallmark Toxic TV Ad problem is simple.

Step 1: As a gesture of Christmas compassion toward humanity, Hallmark stops broadcasting the airport fantasy.

Actually, as far as I’m concerned that takes care of everything. I suppose, though, Hallmark might be unimpressed with my advice to Just Don’t Do It when it comes to advertising their big deal of the season. So,

Step 2: Hallmark replaces the airport ad with one featuring Abi’s kids performing their favorite holiday pastime – triggering noise-generating toys, especially the Very Merry Trio.

You see, I can believe a three year old is wild for the Very Merry Trio. The Prodigal and the Mesomorph, I’m assured, were three once, and loved anything that made a noise when its string was pulled. (Happily, they also had a knack for destroying those toys within minutes.) But, my point is that a commercial showing David and his little bro directing an orchestra of the Very Merry Trio and its companion pieces blaring in perpetuity doesn’t inflict the insult and assault that the airplane ad does.

Of course, this plan calls for Hallmark paying Abi’s family wheelbarrows of cash, 87% of which is earmarked to compensate Abi’s husband for the pain and suffering he endures in the midst of the sight audiovisual phantasmagoria that is household becomes during the holidays and, naturally, to cover the psychiatric treatment he’ll require.

So that’s my recommendation; otherwise, I start writing a new Hallmark Special: The Christmas Vendetta

_____________________

1. These photos of the ad are seriously Photoshopped. I recorded the commercial several times (the things I do for blog-love) and the results were uniformly wretched, featuring a prominent green-blue cast. The products of my heavy-handed fixes are perhaps no more aesthetically pleasing but the contents can, I hope, at least be recognized. None of my changes otherwise shift the ad’s intent. [↩]
2. Also acceptable is “What kind of world is this where guns are banned from flights but The Very Merry Trio is permitted?” [↩]
3. Is it just me or does it look as though Hallmark resurrected Norman Rockwell to paint this scene? [↩]
4. To be fair, other folks apparently like the thing enough to place bids for it on eBay, and presumably Hallmark is selling a few of these as well. [↩]