When Michael Binkley concluded, in a Bloom County strip, that "Christmas is so Republican," it's doubtful that the strip's creator, Berke Breathed, was anticipating Amazon.com's current holiday shopping ads. But this comment is also the key to understanding the campaign and its frequently rotating chorus of middle-aged, not-quite-freakishly ugly men.
First, it bears mention that articles about the ads distributed by newspaper wire services have fatuously claimed that the chorus is meant to suggest the "Christmas-y" feeling that might be missing from online gift shopping. Yes, in contrast to fighting traffic out to the mall, juking and jiving to beat your opponents to parking places, and sparring, jostling and stomping the fiends that would steal the last Pokemon whatchamacallit from your hands, online shopping does lack the holiday feel. Since their customers will miss this experience, the ad provides them virtual Christmas cheer.
What such an interpretation misses is the obvious sarcastic swipe the chorus ads are making at another holiday tradition: inane TV Christmas specials. Now that these are defunct (along with many of their hosts), the alleged entertainment of the holiday variety program is ripe for ironic use in faux-nostalgia. The lighting, setting, costuming, facial expressions, hair styling, camera angles, harmonies, song selections, and graphic display of lyircs (both the fact that the lyrics are on screen and the font) are all quoted from TV variety shows 1960-1973, especially Lawrence Welk.
(My parents subjected me and my sister to Lawrence Welk every Sunday night for the first 8 years of my life, resulting in serious psychological scarring that is best left unexamined, especially in this context.)
Regardless of what Amazon.com might have intended by these ads, the message they send is clear: Christmas cheer is for idiots. Of course, they can't come out and say that, under pains of being labelled Grinches or Scrooges or some other such dysphonious epithet of the kind tossed around in the careless speech of idiots drunk with Christmas cheer ("Oh, don't you 'Bah-Humbug!' You don't want Saint Nick to put a lump of coal in your stocking, do you?!" these people ask, their voices dripping with condescension).
Ads have many ways of being effective, not all of which involve a direct appeal to the emotions that are evoked by the surface layer of the ad's content. It looks like a bunch of guys singing lyrics about products available online through Amazon.com, which seems initially kinda merry. But there's a reason to put exactly these guys on the screen, in these outfits, with all these obvious references to Christmas Specials Past. This is what Christmas once meant, and, frankly, it looks pretty bad.
After all, what we say about Christmas and what we do with Christmas are clearly contradictory. In the name of a religious or nearly religious belief in the grace of God, the goodness of creation, the possibility of redemption, and good will towards men, we engage in a month-long orgy of deficit spending and unlimited, unbridled consumerism. The issue put before us is: which is the excuse for the other?
Amazon's answer is obvious, I think: Christmas is, for idiots, an excuse to help them rationalize buying stuff. Shopping in malls is a way to allay guilt for the crassness of the ritual, a way of tricking ourselves into thinking that the $2.99 snow globe has been transformed into a worthy gift by the fact that we have driven for an hour, tried to park for two hours, wandered the mall for 3 hours, and finally stood in line for 45 minutes at Dana's Hallmark to buy it for Aunt Fay, who is renowned for hating everything.
Hey, forget it. Shop online. Face your crass interior, or else face the choir.