Whether or not they continue to air in 2024, Christmas-themed commercials that aired year after year are easily conjured in the minds of TV viewers. Whether it’s Santa Claus riding a Norelco razor through the snow, Peter coming home for a cup of Folgers or Hershey’s Kisses as bells, plenty of TV ads have replayed over the years, offering familiarity and nostalgia from a familiar brand seeking to worm its way into viewers’ consciousness.
“An ad campaign that plays in 2022 doesn’t simply continue to play unless it stays popular and works, but at Christmastime, all the rules are completely thrown away,” said Robert Thompson, founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications.
He notes the Christmas songs that chart on the Billboard 100 at the holidays are often not new, but songs released decades ago (last week, Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” released in 1994, was No. 1).
“There’s that sense that the old — the familiar, the stuff that comes out of boxes in attics — all of a sudden becomes something that we desire because Christmas is really about going back in time, going back home to see the same old relatives,” he said. “We may have to stay in our old room that we grew up in. The same ornaments go up on the tree and we go back to childhood.”
Thompson said it’s less nostalgia than its own Christmas culture that’s conjured by the holidays.
“It’s the only time that prime-time television can put on a show year after year after year that was made in the Johnson administration, ‘How the Grinch Stole Christmas’ or ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,’ and as often as not they still win their time period,” he said. “I think the question isn’t, ‘Why do they keep replaying these old commercials?’ It should be, ‘Why aren’t all companies doing it?’ I would think they would be pushing all of those emotional buttons and constantly digging that stuff up.”
The Hershey’s Kisses Christmas Bells spot first aired in 1989. Folgers’ “Peter Comes Home for Christmas” ad debuted in 1985. After running for years without changes, both ads got updates — the Folgers spot was redone in 2009, the Hershey’s ad in 2020 — and both updates were met with a negative response.
Locally, the most famous recurring Christmas TV spot has to be the Eat’n Park Christmas Tree ad that depicts a Christmas tree helping a star get to its place atop the tree. Now airing for the 42nd consecutive year, the spot underwent only a slight tweak since it was first broadcast in 1982. (The voiceover was changed at some point from “Merry Christmas” to “Happy Holidays” to be more universal, per Eat’n Park parent company CEO Jeff Broadhurst.)
Broadhurst’s father, Jim, commissioned the Christmas Star spot with the notion it could run for 20 years as a “thank you” to the city of Pittsburgh.
“By the late ’80s, early ’90s, it became pretty clear this had some legs,” Jeff Broadhurst said. “Forty-two years later, the commercial continues to be that everlasting, and in some cases when you look at what’s going on in the community and elsewhere, a symbol of hope out there that continues to bring everyone together, even if it’s just for that quick commercial. Hopefully, it resonates throughout the holiday season. We know it does for many people.”
Broadhurst said rerunning the same ad annually is far more about nostalgia; saving the cost of making a new ad doesn’t even factor into the decision.
“Forty-two years is a long time to run the same commercial, so it’s a nostalgia play,” he said. “It’s shifted even more since the boom of social media. Now there are social media posts and reposts, and the buzz is huge. In some cases, we periodically run it (on social media) in the middle of the year because we all need to be in the holiday spirit sometimes.”
The Eat’n Park spot has spawned multiple merchandise spinoffs, from star and tree cookies to a coffee mug, a long-sleeve T-shirt, a Christmas sweater and an ornament showing the Christmas tree on a TV set screen. (That ornament, benefitting the company’s Caring for Kids campaign that raises money for children’s hospitals, is sold out at Smileycookie.com but may still be available in some restaurants.)
Thompson traces the history of Christmas-themed TV commercials to before the popularization of television with Coca-Cola’s ongoing magazine print ads by illustrator Haddon Sundblom that debuted in 1931.
“That may be the most perfect example of recycling (ads),” Thompson said. “In this case, it’s not a TV commercial and it’s not the exact same thing every year, but it’s an example of not only something that worked over decades, but it became so instilled in our consciousness that it was not only evoking nostalgia for that Coca-Cola (Santa) look, but it was also in essence solidifying the invention of (Santa), one of the greatest holiday symbols ever.”
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