WHAT’S THE POINT?
I love marketing. I love crafting a message and getting it out to the public. I enjoy doing the graphic design, the demographic research, the competitive evaluations.
But I am sick of marketers who have no understanding of the annual calendar.
I was shopping last week in a major grocery store chain. As I walked around the maze of candy bar mountains and soda specials, in between the Halloween decorations of scary/innocuous witches, goblins and ghouls was a sight by far more scary to me than any of the plastic spiders and severed hands. It was an electric light reindeer. You know the kind, the head moves up and down and side to side. It was September. That’s wrong.
There are those who use the word “abomination” in regards to just about everything that modern society values. I am no luddite, wishing that we could return to the days of horse and buggy, though with gas prices as high as they are, it seems like a better idea every day. But there was a time when a holiday was a month-long experience.
Most months have a reasonably good excuse to throw a party, whether it be a St. Patrick’s Day drunk fest, which somehow honors those of Irish heritage with gallons of dark beer and fools being sick in the parking lot, or the faux romance of St. Valentines Day, a day dedicated to making the single person feel less than accomplished.
Holidays are funny. They basically are used by marketing departments to sell products. Historically, they represented a break in a routine. Bringing a joy to life, where families gathered and spent time together making a feast, and reacquainting with each other.
These days, they are fast becoming nothing more than an opportunity to increase the bottom line for those dreaded corporations who make our lives busier and blander. I can remember as a kid going to Thanksgiving at my cousin Roger’s house. He had this great home on Mulholland, overlooking the valley, with a peek at the Hollywood sign.
Being of Italian descent, it was a grand affair of food and family. Lots of people would fly in from New York. There would be these very exotic aunts who were much, much older than everyone else, with their thick New York accents, and they would tell stories about the “old days.” My cousin would prepare for days for that party. It was a huge event. There was the traditional Thanksgiving dishes of antipasto, pasta with all kinds of sausages and meatballs, and gallons of espresso and Sambuca were consumed.
It was something I looked forward to as a kid. It was a reconnection with my family, those cousins who lived far, far away in Orange County, and with those aunts who lived in West Hollywood.
Holidays had meaning. They were a time of grounding, of getting a balance in life to remember where you came from. It was a tradition in my family on Christmas Eve to go to the Italian deli to buy antipas-to supplies. This was always an adventure for me — the deli with its wonderful smells and the exotic goods that you could only get there, made for a shopping adventure.
These days, they have become so commercialized, so pre-packaged, homogenized and bland that they no longer seem to have value to us as people, but only as consumers.
It could be that I am longing for a time when I was a child, and looked at the world with the wonder only a child has. Perhaps if I had a child myself, I would experience that same amazement at the changing of the seasons and excitement of waiting with bated breath for what was next.
Frankly I don’t think so. In a world where every major grocery store has pre-packaged holiday dinners “for your convenience,” where I can buy a Santa in September, and every holiday has been so commercialized as to wipe it free of any religious meaning, I don’t think the problem is me.
When I was boy, Chanukah was a simple Jewish holiday of no great importance. Then, the marketers got a hold of it. Today, it is plastered everywhere and is sold as the Jewish equivalent to Christmas. It’s not. It shouldn’t be sold that way. And the only reason why it gets so much play is to sell products.
Kwanzaa was created in 1966 by Dr. Maulana Karenga, professor of the department of black studies at California State University-Long Beach. It is a cultural holiday, not a religious one. It was designed to be “available to and practiced by Africans of all religious faiths who come together based on the rich, ancient and varied common ground of their Africanness.” This “new” holiday is suffering from the same sort of creeping blandness that is taking all the flavor out of what used to be culture.
Not to be outdone, the Muslims have their own soon-to-be-over-marketed holiday. According to about.com, “Mawlid al- Nabi” this date marks the celebration of Muhammad’s birth in 570 C.E., and has been fixed at the 12th day of the month Rabi al-Awwal. Mawlid al-Nabi appears to have been first celebrated in the 13th century and involved a month-long festival. Today, the focus is mostly on the actual date itself and includes sermons, gift giving and a feast.
There are between 5 and 8 million Muslims in America. Can it be much longer before the marketers of decide to rename Mawlid al-Nabi, repackage it, and position it as something that everyone can partake in?
I long for the days when I had to wait to December to buy Christmas decorations, when my Jewish friends would gloat about their “eight whole days” of Chanukah, when I had to wait to October to buy a pumpkin for carving and November meant a long wait to get to the Italian feast on Thanksgiving.
Maybe I’m just getting old, but it seems like we used to enjoy our holidays more, when we had them in smaller increments. (David Pisarra is a business development lawyer in the Santa Monica firm of Pisarra & Grist. He welcomes your questions and comments. He or (310) 664-9969.)
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on October 4, 2005. Read the original PDF.