The Three Wise Truisms

I call him Commie Santa, the Hero of Industrial Plenitude the Soviets
were getting ready to honor with a statue before their collapse.

Wait, did I miss them, the true harbingers of the Christmas season?!!

You know them, those black-and-white cologne commercials in which gaunt models, starved for love and food, suggest their desire for both with mouths agape and eyes distant and flashing. The angry sea crashes dangerously close.

Those commercials, of course, signal Christmas is coming: Put eau de toilette at the top of your list, and prepare for the onslaught of wanton consumerism disguised as warm televised (also, computerized) nourishment for the soul.

But I missed these warnings and got swept out to the sea of Ad Nauseam.

In the early going, the commercials follow three basic truisms:

[1] For God so loved the world that he gave you this smartphone. It is the greatest gift to humankind, dispensing world peace and, judging by some commercials, dispatching alien invaders.

[2] No greater love hath any mother than to make sure her children get only the coolest gifts and shame every other mother for falling short. The spirit of Christmas manifest.

[3] It is nothing to give your loved one a new car for Christmas. A trifle. So obvious, the Acura and Mercedes Benz and Lexus and Audi makers seem practically embarrassed to suggest such a thing. We have celebrated that holiday tradition so many times — walking our loved one, hands over his/her eyes, out to our brick-paved driveways, swept clean but banked on its edges with storybook sugar-crystal snowdrifts, to the gleaming new automobile — that we risk driving into a rut. But we buy a new car for Christmas each year because of course it transcends joblessness and economic disaster. In fact, it solves both, especially the tenuous production of gigantic bows to place atop the sedans.

It's time to surrender to the Ad Nauseam. No better way than to sing the carols twisted into sales pitches ("Talking in a Winter Wonderland!" or the flash mob, "We wish you a Merry Christmas, but at the mall you're spending too much!") or camp out in front of the Hallmark Channel, which will roll out nine 14 (!) original Christmas-themed movies to go with its collection of umpteen, and has already been showing Christmas movies since before Halloween! Halleluia!