Stay Tuned/A Short Pre-Seasonal Rant

Is it too early to begin complaining about Christmas merchandising? I don't see why it should be. It's apparently not too early for the merchandising itself.

Thanksgiving doesn't exist anymore. It's a huge holiday for grocery sales, but the advertisers couldn't care less. Oh, sure, there are a few foodstuffs which actually sell better at Thanksgiving than any other time - turkeys, pie fillings, certain kinds of baking goods, raisins and currants, stuffing mixes, cranberries - but everybody else is apparently foregoing Thanksgiving ads and concentrating their efforts on The Main Event.

This is not news, of course. I have here an essay by Jean Kerr (which originally appeared sometime just before 1970) where she notes, among other observations on the holiday in question:

Even so, I was all right years ago when the department stores - in their mercy - used to delay their decorating until after Thanksgiving. Then we had a breathing space, a time to be thankful before it was yet time to be joyful. Now the decorations go up any time after Veteran's Day, and I suspect they'll be sneaking back to Labor Day any minute. You can be wandering down Fifth Avenue on a day of golden Indian summer, thinking your own thoughts, step inside the store to buy nothing more than a pair of nylons, and suddenly find the place a thicket of holly and a downpour of tinsel. When this happens, I panic.

When we entered the grocery store today, the first thing which hit the eye - placed so you almost had to bump into it as you entered - was a display of Oreos. Some of them were in a "holiday tin" with an illustration of Santa eating an Oreo left out for him; the rest were in what looked almost like a normal Oreo package, except that it was red instead of blue. Upon closer inspection, these were found to contain Oreos whose filling had been dyed red.

This principle of dyeing perfectly non-Christmasy products red and green is fortunately not a widespread one, as it tends to get disgusting fast. (I recall an "Archie" cartoon where the school dietician - what we'd call "the cafeteria lady" - had dyed the Christmas mashed potatoes red and green. Mr. Weatherbee responded by turning a very similar shade of green himself.) Unfortunately it's widespread enough that I was forced to witness Pillsbury sugar cookie dough - a special package of two tubes - one tube with the dough dyed red, and the other dyed green.

I'm fond of Christmas cookies, but I prefer to make them the normal color and then ice them in red and green. Maybe it's just me. Pillsbury also has the millefiore cookies that I've already mentioned in other places, which show a green pine-tree shape in the center when you slice them. These, by the by, have to be packaged in rigid tubes instead of the usual sausage casings. Not surprising. I myself wouldn't be able to resist giving the tubes a squeeze in passing, in hopes of distorting the tree into a map of Chile or something.

At least, in the case of the Pillsbury cookies, it's something people actually do make in large quantities for the season, and therefore has some justification. It's a little harder to fathom why people like Keebler would take their normal line of crackers and bring out the "Holiday" packaging - with utterly no other difference? Do they really sell more Town House crackers at Christmas because the box says "Holiday" on it? Are there people who think it's a crime to buy normally packaged Town House crackers during the holidays? (Never mind. I don't want to know the answer to that.)

In the case of Bigelow, the "why can't we get anyone to notice us?" tea company, putting out a "holiday tea assortment" package is probably a survival technique ... but for most of these companies, there is a definite question as to why they'd do something like this in the first place. Assuming that the Town House crackers taste the same, how many people are going to switch from buying Ritz crackers for a month because of the spiffy package? Is it enough to justify doing a completely different printing run a couple of months a year?

In the case of the candy bar people, whose bags of holiday-wrapped miniatures are generally the first things to appear - they, and the wrapping paper, appear the day after Hallowe'en, usually occupying the very "seasonal merchandise" aisle the Hallowe'en candy just vacated - the ploy does seem to have been a success, in that I see more people buying these candy bars and leaving them in bowls, et cetera, around the office, than ever before. (In a stocking, which is the only place I ever saw candy bars at Christmas as a child, what does it matter how they're wrapped?) It looks good, and it's cheaper than buying all the other secretaries a little gift.

(I also noted that, among the aisle of wrapping papers, there was one little blue stand-up holding Hanukkah wrapping. The resident Jewish person notes the following: "I feel like my holiday is being ignored ... but, on the other hand, I'm kinda happy that it's being ignored." I know exactly what she means.)

In some cases Christmas merchandising is used as a bare excuse to jack up the prices. The President's Choice people, whom I normally endorse whole-heartedly, were offering an assortment of cookies for twelve bucks. The same assortment, without the tin box and the word "Holiday," would probably go for half that.

It's sad. Even the florist's department is not immune: although the poinsettias and fir wreaths, being fairly perishable, won't be out in force for another couple of weeks, they were offering little miniature pines in red foil-wrapped pots ("Live Christmas Tree"), and even rosemary plants clipped into a pine-tree-like shape. The horror! The horror!

However, the two saddest and most frightening items I saw today were both beverages.

Inglenook had, on a shelf with some other holiday-pitched goods, some of the most generic-looking bottles of wine that I have ever seen. The bottles were clear glass; the labels black and featureless, with plain white print. They indicated the color of the wine on the label - despite the clear glass. They had a white, a red, a rosé, and a champagne. Wine enthusiasts (and I do not mean wine snobs, but people who drink wine at least a couple of times a year and are not completely terror-struck by a restaurant wine list) will not be at all surprised to know that the wines were a Chardonnay, a Cabernet Sauvignon, and a "white Zinfandel." These were clearly wines for people who are terrified of wine, yet feel that they "have" to have wine during the holidays for one reason or another, and it nearly made me want to cry. For ten dollars they could go out and with a minimum of fuss get a very respectable bottle of wine - and most wine sellers would be happy to recommend a nice bottle, because that's how they keep their business. It's just a damn shame, that's all.

The wine made me sad; the other product invoked an altogether different reaction. I noticed that Hood, the largest regional dairy hereabouts, not only had its usual eggnog, but also "Light" eggnog. Upon inspection, the difference was that the first three ingredients in the normal eggnog were milk, sugar, and cream, with nonfat milk much further down; in the light version, the cream was replaced altogether by nonfat milk. No difference in the amount of sugar - nor of egg, for that matter.

However, the weirdest was yet to come. With my attention already on the eggnog display, I then noticed that Hood also had some varieties of flavored "holiday nog" - Amaretto, Cinnamon Hazelnut, and (ahem) Chocolate Irish Cream. They apparently were loaded with flavor - and sugar - but, as the omission in the naming makes clear, they were utterly devoid of egg. Yup. So basically these are sweetened, flavored milk.

But what the hell. It's the holidays, after all.

[February 2007:] This was the second week in a row that I mentioned the fine President's Choice line of goods, so I suppose I should add an explanatory word.

President's Choice is a Canadian line that our local supermarkets stocked for a while as a premium house brand. All the products we tried of theirs were above-average, but it was really one particular cookie that I was addicted to. The product line is still going strong, and there is a mail-order source for the cookies, but eventually the local stores added a premium line that I liked almost as much, and with that I have contented myself.

A couple of days after this was first posted, a regular reader took me to task for criticizing holiday tins, and her objection is quite reasonable:

"I love the annual offering of holiday tins. Admittedly, I'd love them better without Santa Claus, but the tins, in and of themselves, make the product instantly buyable. My fondest possession was my old Premium Saltine tin, the only sensible way to keep the crackers fresh. I've bought any number of Oreo and Fig Newton tins, but I kept losing them to my cookie-baking nephews. I don't mind paying an extra 2 - 3 bucks for the tin at all. I get tempted by the fancy tins at the Nabisco website anyhow - anything to avoid the dreaded greasy Tupperware. Besides, the tins are a good place to keep my refrigerator magnets, which I'm also addicted to (the flat kind)."

Since I am fairly compulsive about Rubbermaid containers, and don't use tins, this never would have occurred to me. I stand corrected.

and now back to our program

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