Sign on the Window

It’s the holidays, that time of year where I spend much of my time hurling swear words at my widescreen in response to all the shameless advertising.

There are few things I hate more than some money-grubbing corporation telling me that it won’t really be Christmas unless I buy whatever overpriced crap they’re peddling.

Most of these ads are about as subtle as one of those door-busting holiday sales that department stores insist on staging--and about as pleasant.

These spots blatanly hijack beloved carols and regurgitate them as pathetic jingles.

They dragoon Santa Claus and Ebenezer Scrooge to serve as pitchmen, encouraging us all to have a Merry Christmas as we run our credit card bills into the stratosphere.

One car company is particularly outrageous. I refuse to mention the name, but the ads depict smiling simpletons giving each other brand new cars—complete with oversized bows—as gifts.

Oh, yeah, everybody I know gives out cars at Christmas.

I have this reoccurring fantasy where a repo man drives up, hooks the gift-wrapped vehicles to a noisy old tow truck and drives off into the snowy darkness with a hearty cry of “you’re missed your payment, loser!”

(By the way, Saturday Night Live recently roasted this awful ad campaign.)

The only holiday ad I enjoy is the Norelco Santa commercial, which I have loved ever since I was a little shaver.

This spot features a stop motion Kris Kringle sliding into a town on a giant Norelco electric razor. The ad ends with the now-famous line, “Even our name says Merry Christmas.”

But now Kohl’s has come along and disrupted my long winter’s kvetch with a 90-second gem that has me clamoring for the Kleenex every time I see it.

And yet I keep on watching it.

The ad, created by director Rodrigo Garcia Saiz for the ad agency Yard NYC, is part of the retailers’ “Give with All Your Heart” campaign and it sure gave this old heart of mine a serious workout.

In this Covid-conscious story, a little girl befriends an elderly woman living next door through a series of signs they hold up in their windows.

There is no dialog and the only voice we hear is Willie Nelson singing “The Rainbow Connection” from The Muppet Movie.

You Gotta Have Heart

Yeah, they’re really hitting below the belt on this one.

“Will you be my friend?” the little girl writes on her sign.

“I would love that,” the woman responds.

And here comes the water works. There’s something about this little girl just straight up asking someone to be her friend that gets the teardrops falling.

Only a child would be so forthcoming in seeking companionship. Somewhere along the way to adulthood we seemed to have lost this ability to connect with each other in such a simple and direct manner.

It’s an easy question to a child, but to an adult it can sound like desperation.

Okay, so next the little girl puts up a sign asking the woman her favorite color.

“Green. Yours?” the neighbor asks.

The little girl tapes up her response: “Red What’s your name?”

But then something goes wrong and the woman drops out of sight.

Time goes by, the little girl looks out her window forlornly for her new friend, but all she sees is the taped sign on the window gradually come loose.

Finally, on Christmas morning, she gets up, looks out her window and sees her friend is back. The neighbor is wearing a plastic hospital bracelet, which explains her disappearance.

The spot ends with the woman holding up a sign asking “Did you get what wished for?” and the little girl smiles and nods her head.

And I start crying hysterically.

I can’t help myself, damn it, this thing just breaks my heart. It is a testament to the filmmaker’s skill that he was able to stir up so much emotion in less than two minutes.

Yes, it’s a commercial, but it’s not a rallying cry for rabid consumerism.

The Christmas season is likely to be very difficult this year.

The world was a lonely place before the coronavirus arrived and this plague has only served to increase feelings of isolation a hundredfold.

This ad shows that people can still connect in the harshest times even if they can’t get close.