Advertising Christmas Quotes

Last December I saw an advertisement outside an electronics store. There was a little boy, delirious with delight, surrounded by computers, stereos, and other gadgets. The text read: “We know what your child wants for Christmas.” I stared at the poster, then said to no one in particular, “What your child wants for Christmas is your love, but if he can’t get that, he’ll settle for a bunch of electronic crap.

Advertising executives must be wringing their greedy hands over the prospect, anxious for their next holiday campaign. Mom is helpless before them all. We’re not a family anymore. We’re a commodity in an Amazon database. Are we humans, or consumers?

If Santa Claus was a politician, he would only put billboards promising the best Christmas presents.

My other chore is to buy a tree- a thankless task. The only truly well-proportioned Christmas trees are the ones they use in advertisements. If you try and find one in real life you face inevitable disapointment. Your tree will lean to the left or the right. It will be too bushy at the base, or straggly at the top. Even if you do, by some miracle, find a perfect tree, if won't fit in the car and by the time you strap it to the rooftop and drive it home the branches are broken and twisted out of shape. You wrestle it through the door, gagling on pine needles and sweating profusely, only to hear the maddening question from countless Christmases past: 'Is that really the best one you could find?

People never like to talk about their slower relatives. I got a cousin, twice removed, got webs between his toes, ain't said one word his whole life. You never hear about him in the family newsletter that goes around every Christmas. Hell, nobody mentions me, either, if it comes to that. Families is funny about who they advertise.

And I’m not going to lie, a little bit of me wanted to believe what I saw in advertising and in holiday movies.

Unfortunately, no one really advertises that growth hurts

The True-Blue American" Jeremiah Dickson was a true-blue American, For he was a little boy who understood America, for he felt that he must Think about everything; because that’s all there is to think about, Knowing immediately the intimacy of truth and comedy, Knowing intuitively how a sense of humor was a necessity For one and for all who live in America. Thus, natively, and Naturally when on an April Sunday in an ice cream parlor Jeremiah Was requested to choose between a chocolate sundae and a banana split He answered unhesitatingly, having no need to think of it Being a true-blue American, determined to continue as he began: Rejecting the either-or of Kierkegaard, and many another European; Refusing to accept alternatives, refusing to believe the choice of between; Rejecting selection; denying dilemma; electing absolute affirmation: knowing in his breast The infinite and the gold Of the endless frontier, the deathless West. “Both: I will have them both!” declared this true-blue American In Cambridge, Massachusetts, on an April Sunday, instructed By the great department stores, by the Five-and-Ten, Taught by Christmas, by the circus, by the vulgarity and grandeur of Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon, Tutored by the grandeur, vulgarity, and infinite appetite gratified and Shining in the darkness, of the light On Saturdays at the double bills of the moon pictures, The consummation of the advertisements of the imagination of the light Which is as it was—the infinite belief in infinite hope—of Columbus, Barnum, Edison, and Jeremiah Dickson.

She had been away, yes. Always good to get back, right. With weather this dry they were lucky to have gotten through Thanksgiving without a fire, yes. No way she was ready to start dealing with Christmas, no. She had sat then in the rental car in the parking lot, almost deserted at four in the afternoon. Four in the afternoon was not the time when women who lived here shopped. Women who lived here shopped in the morning, before tennis, after working out. If she still lived here she would not be sitting in a rental car in the parking lot at four in the afternoon. One of the high school boys who worked in the market after school was stringing up Christmas lights on the board advertising the day's specials. Another was rounding up carts, jamming the carts into long trains and propelling each train into the rack with a single extended finger. By the time the last light dropped behind Point Dume the carts were all racked and the Christmas lights were blinking red and green and she had stopped crying. (page 153)

A poster of a woman in tights heralded the Christmas pantomime, and little red devils, who had come in again that year, were prevalent upon the Christmas-cards. Margaret was no morbid idealist. She did not wish this spate of business and self-advertisement checked. It was only the occasion of it that struck her with amazement annually. How many of these vacillating shoppers and tired shop-assistants realised that it was a divine event that drew them together? She realised it, though standing outside in the matter. She was not a Christian in the accepted sense; she did not believe that God had ever worked among us as a young artisan. These people, or most of them, believed it, and if pressed, would affirm it in words. But the visible signs of their belief were Regent Street or Drury Lane, a little mud displaced, a little money spent, a little food cooked, eaten, and forgotten. Inadequate. But in public who shall express the unseen adequately? It is private life that holds out the mirror to infinity; personal intercourse, and that alone, that ever hints at a personality beyond our daily vision.

The only truly well proportioned Christmas trees are the ones they use in advertisements. If you try to find one in real life you face inevitable disappointment. Your tree will lean to the left or the right. It will be too bushy at the base, or straggly at the top. It will have bald patches, or the branches on either side will be oddly spaced. Even if you do, by some miracle, find a perfect tree, it won’t fit in the car and by the time you strap it to the roof rack and drive home the branches are broken or twisted out of shape. You wrestle it through the door, gagging on pine needles and sweating profusely, only to hear the maddening question that resonates down from countless Christmases past: “Is that really the best one you could find?

Temptations came to him, in middle age, tentatively and without insistence, like a neglected butcher-boy who asks for a Christmas box in February for no more hopeful reason that than he didn’t get one in December. He had no more idea of succumbing to them than he had of purchasing the fish-knives and fur boas that ladies are impelled to sacrifice through the medium of advertisement columns during twelve months of the year. Still, there was something impressive in this unasked-for renunciation of possibly latent enormities.

Red and green, blue and yellow, weird fantastic shapes and colors, jiggling and winking and blaring in and out, each one trying to offer a mightier attraction to the eye than the other. Christmas signs. What a travesty on Christmas! The birth of the Savior of the world mixed up with advertisements of beer and toys! Christmas commercialized! She sighed over the way the world was going. Yet Christmas had always been to her the crowning joy of the year. The time when human love and beauty reached up and touched heaven, and earthly hates and passions were forgotten for a little while because of the long-ago birth of the Christ child.

Red and green, blue and yellow, weird fantastic shapes and colors, jiggling and winking and blaring in and out, each one trying to offer a mightier attraction to the eye than the other. Christmas signs. What a travesty on Christmas! The birth of the Savior of the world mixed up with advertisements of beer and toys! Christmas commercialized! She sighed over the way the world was going.

certainly before I’d even moved here. Benny had retired when the bank closed, but he’d remained the town’s unofficial banking advisor until he died during the summer. Both Nell and Olek had picked his brains about monetary matters and Daniel had asked him to look over the business plan for his greengrocer’s too. Every town needed someone like Benny. Someone to rally the troops, guilt-trip people into helping out for the good of the community, cajole people into selling raffle tickets and if you were a business, he was very persuasive when it came to buying advertising space in the town magazine, edited, of course, by Benny

That Christmas, the now long-closed Parisian restaurant Voisin famously advertised one of the dishes on its festive menu: ‘cat flanked by rats.’ The same menu also had elephant and kangaroo on offer as the starving city pillaged its zoos.

the “advertising lords” of Madison Avenue who “had reduced Christmas to a carnival of mass marketing.

Fairs to raise funds for the abolitionist movement also advertised trees.

The consumer society and its harassed citizens had other things to think of. Although it was a month to Christmas, the advertising orgy had begun and the buying hysteria spread as swiftly and ruthlessly as the Black Death along the festooned shopping streets. The epidemic swept all before it and there was no escape. It ate its way into homes and apartments, poisoning and braking down everything and everyone in its path. Children were already howling from exhaustion and fathers of families were plunged into debt until their next vacation. The gigantic legalized confidence trick claimed victims everywhere. The hospitals had a boom in cardiac infractions, nervous breakdowns, and burst stomach ulcers. The police stations downtown had frequent visits from the outriders of the great family festival, in the shape of Santa Clauses who were dragged blind drunk out of doorways and public urinals. . .two exhausted patrolmen dropped a drunken Father Christmas in the gutter when they tried to get him into a taxi.

When you’re a kid,” he said, “time lasts forever. You’re immortal. When your grandparents die, it’s not real. Not yet. Then your parents go, and … well, it’s like there’s no more insurance. You’re next in line. You’re that guy!” He laughed. “The last one standing. The one everyone wants to make sure to see at Christmas, because you never know. You never know. I can see them grieving me even while I’m still here. And there’s a comfort in that. A love. So maybe that’s what you’re giving your father by being here. Even if he doesn’t know it in his brain, he knows it in his cells.” Her throat was dry, and her eyes burned. She folded her hands, staring down at the ridgeline of her knuckles. The man said, “What?” She cleared her throat. “The mourning, it sucks, yeah, but no one tells you…” He kept his gaze steady on her. She forced out the words. “No one tells you how hard it is not to get resentful.” “Accept it,” he said. “If you accept life, you accept all its rich, awful complexities. Because if you think about it, what’s the alternative?” She thought of pork-belly sliders and dude-bros thumbing their phones over dinner and the sweet bullshit promise of demo-targeted advertising. She took the man’s hand, skin draped over bone. “Thank you.

At a key point in the letter James told his readers: “You do not have because you do not ask God” (4:2). Prayer makes a difference. Your prayer makes a difference. “The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective” (5:16). One of the most successful advertising campaigns of recent years came from a regional airline in the US during the run-up to Christmas. They set up a “virtual Santa” in the departure lounge of a domestic flight. Passengers would scan their boarding pass, activating a screen featuring Santa (located somewhere else and with access to their flight details), who would then ask them what they wanted for Christmas before sending them on their way. Unbeknownst to the passengers, employees from the airline then went out to local malls to purchase and wrap the very things the passengers had asked for—everything from new socks to a widescreen TV. When the passengers arrived at their destination, their gifts arrived along with their luggage at the baggage belt. Many stood in disbelief when they realised what had happened. Needless to say, the video recording their reactions went viral, providing the airline with way more publicity and goodwill than a standard commercial would have generated. But after the warm glow from watching it subsided, I had one thought in my mind: The guy who only asked for socks must be kicking himself. Once he’d realised what had happened, surrounded by people with expensive cameras and tablets, he must have felt a little foolish clutching a pair of socks. If only he had known. If only he had asked. James does not want us to make the same mistake. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective. It is real. Things actually happen. God answers. How foolish we are not to pray far more than we do. How foolish, at the end of the day, aware of all that we could have had, to be left clutching the equivalent of a pair of socks that we never even realised we would get. Not every Christian can be a great theologian, preacher, missionary or evangelist. But every Christian can be a great and effective pray-er.

The Southern Christmas is rich in its traditions, its own beauties, its own recipes and notions and yes, peculiarities. It is why, no matter where we live in the world, we yearn to come home as time draws near. It is more than a cliche. The Southern Christmas is not one of television advertising. It is a sight better than that.

Why did parents need to pretend that Santa Claus was real, and to deny that the presents really came from family members themselves? The answer is that Santa Claus had an extraordinary ability (in spite of his early commercialization) to disguise the fact that most of the presents he brought were commodity productions. Like other Americans, writers, editors, and advertisers in the second quarter of the nineteenth century liked to pretend, or even believe (as most Americans nowadays continue to do), that Santa Claus represented an old-fashioned Christmas, a ritual so old that it was, in essence, beyond history, and thus outside the commercial marketplace

We walked home in the cold afternoon past Franklin Simon's windows, where the children of all nations revolved steadily in the light. Most of the stores were concentrating on the gift aspect of the Nativity, displaying frankincense, myrrh, and bath salts, but Franklin Simon advertised the Child Himself, along with a processional of other children of assorted races, lovely to behold. We stood and watched passers-by take in this international and interracial scene, done in terms of childhood, and we observed the gleam in the eyes of colored people as they spotted the little colored child in with the others. There hasn't been a Christmas like this one since the first Christmas--the fear, the suffering, the awe, the strange new light that nobody understands yet. All the traditional characteristics of Christmas are this year in reverse: instead of the warm grate and the happy child, in most parts of the world the cold room and the starveling. The soldiers of the triumphant armies return to their homes to find a hearty welcome but an unfamiliar air of uneasiness, uncertainty, and constraint. They find, too, that people are groping toward something which still has no name but which keeps turning up--in department-store windows and in every other sort of wistful human display. It is the theme concealed in the victory which the armies of the democracies won in the field, the yet unclaimed triumph: justice among men of all races, a world in which children (of whatever country) are warm and unafraid. It seems too bad that men are preparing to blow the earth to pieces just as they have got their hands on a really first-rate idea. Our Christmas greetings this year are directed to the men and women who will represent the people of the world at the meeting of the United Nations Organization in January. We send them best wishes and a remembrance of that first Christmas. Our hope is that they will shed the old robes which have adorned dignitaries for centuries and put on the new cloth that fits one man as well as another, no matter where he lives on this worried and all too shatterable earth.

Don't get me wrong. I'm no Grinch. I just don't understand why people can't be jolly all year round instead of saving it for when the advertising companies say they should be happy spending all their hard-earned money on shit no one wants.

Unfortunately, no one really advertises that growth hurts like a son of a bitch.

Faith exalts the human heart, by removing it from the market-place, making it sacred and unexchangeable. Under the jurisdiction of religion our deeper feelings are sacralised, so as to become raw material for the ethical life: the life lived in judgement. When faith declines, however, the sacred is unprotected from marauders; the heart can be captured and put on sale. When this happens the human heart becomes kitsch. The clichéd kiss, the doe-eyed smile, the Christmas-card sentiments advertise what cannot be advertised without ceasing to be. They therefore commit the salesman to nothing; they can be bought and sold without emotional hardship, since the emotion, being a fantasy product, no longer exists in its committed and judgement-bearing form.