A Christmas Monkey Miracle

The holidays can be hard. Joyful, but hard. My ten-year-old gave me her Christmas list this morning. She handed it to me over breakfast and watched me like a hawk while I read down to the bottom and found the last two items:

Item #19: A motorcycle

Item #20: A pet ferret

When she was sure I must be finished, she cleared her throat.

“I really want the motorcycle,” she said, staring at me, unblinking. “And not a toy one. A super-fast, dangerous real one.” That was out of character for her. She is not normally a motorcycle-type kid.

“Really?”

“Yes,” she answered, still staring at me. “I will be heartbroken if I don’t get one.”

“Heartbroken?” What was she up to?

“Yes, so are you going to get me one?”

“Of course not,” I told her. “You’re way too young to even get a motorcycle license.”

“I’m devastated,” she said, working hard to look the part. She even laid her head down on her arms and made an unconvincing crying sound. I looked back at her list.

“You’re not getting a ferret,” I told her. The fake crying stopped instantly, and her head snapped up.

“I haven’t even asked yet,” she complained.

“But you were about to tell me it’s the only thing that can console you, weren’t you?”

She glared at me.

“Why can’t I have a ferret?” she demanded.

“No more pets,” I told her. “Two dogs are more than enough.”

“But a ferret is different. Ferrets are so smart and beautiful and cuddly,” she pleaded.

“Please! You wouldn’t have to get me anything else for Christmas.”

“No,” I said firmly. “Out of the question. No ferret.”

“You’re so mean,” she told me, really sounding hurt now. “I bet you don’t even know what it’s like to want a furry little friend just for your own.”

But I did know. You see, I had requested a furry little friend just for my own on my thirteenth Christmas in 1977. I hadn’t asked for a ferret though; I had asked for a monkey. Apart from a whole bunch of fantasy books, it was pretty much all I wanted. I hadn’t been as clever as my daughter. I hadn’t set up my list with a straw-dog motorcycle I could sacrifice to make the monkey seem less extravagant. I had, however, been very magnanimous about my request. I’d allowed as how I didn’t need a chimpanzee if my parents felt that would be too big. I was ready to settle for a smaller primate, like a spider monkey, a lemur or even a capuchin. But my mom and dad gave me the same response I gave my daughter. We already had two dogs. A monkey was absolutely out of the question.

I was not concerned. Obviously, if my parents were planning to surprise me with a monkey, this was exactly the kind of ploy they’d pull. It would be the only way they could fool me into thinking I wasn’t getting one. So I worked at being a model child as the last ten days ticked down toward the big event. It was incredibly hard, but I made my bed almost every morning. I cleaned my room to the best of my ability. I even ate my asparagus, despite my firm conviction that asparagus was toxic. I also dropped hints like a madman to everyone in my family, hoping they were all in on it and one of them would let something slip that would confirm it. I even phoned my older brothers, who were away at college, to talk about the monkey. And every time I was told I wasn’t getting one, I tried to look sad, all the while feeling a growing conviction that, come Christmas morning, I would have my own furry friend.

Then, the night before Christmas, my parents put their presents to me under the tree. I couldn’t tell for sure because they were wrapped, but most of them were obviously just books. I had requested A Spell for Chameleon by Piers Anthony, Swords and Ice Magic by Fritz Leiber and The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander. Even the bigger, non-book-shaped package couldn’t possibly contain a monkey. Not only was it too flat, it was far too light, and it had no air holes. Also, when I shook it, it rattled like the game Hungry Hungry Hippos, which I had also requested. Monkeys don’t rattle.

And now I was devastated. My parent’s hadn’t lied to me, the jerks. They really weren’t getting me a monkey.

But much later that Christmas Eve, after I had mostly gotten over my disappointment and had been lying awake in my bed for what seemed like days, I heard something that made my heart leap. No, it wasn’t the sound of reindeer on the rooftop. It was a little startled shriek from my mother and then a lot of whispering.

“It’s moving,” her horrified words came muffled through my bedroom wall. She was talking to my older brothers, who must have just gotten in from college. “You can’t put it under the tree.” I held my breath. What was going on?

“Don’t worry. He can’t get out,” said my brother John, and I could hear the grin in his voice.

He? Get out? They couldn’t be talking about a …

“Isn’t he cute?” my brother Bill chimed in. “He’s so furry.”

It had to be …

“No, it’s not cute! I can’t believe you brought that into the house,” my mother scolded.

A monkey. My brothers had gotten me my monkey. It was a Christmas miracle! But then my heart stumbled in my chest. Would my mother make them take it back to wherever they’d gotten it? Would I be allowed to keep it?

“Well, put something heavy on top of its cage,” my mother whispered. “If that things gets out, I’ll have a heart attack!”

There was no sleep for me for the rest of that glorious night. I lay in bed, going through names for my monkey. Maximillian? Einstein? Boris? And thinking about how, when I took him to school to show everyone, he could wear the baby clothes my little brother had outgrown. And I would train little Boris to sit on my shoulder and wear a tiny fez and pick people’s pockets. I would be the most popular kid in the history of middle school. I would be like a god among children.

We had a rule in my family. No one was allowed to “wake up” for Christmas morning until the sky had begun to turn gray. That’s why I spent the last hour or so sitting on the edge of my bed, staring out the window for the faintest touch of light. And when at last it arrived, I was out of that room like a bullet out of a gun. I sprinted to the tree, just as the rest of my siblings were converging on it, ready to explode from anticipation.

There was my pile of presents, much taller than when I’d last seen it because it had been stacked on top of a container with air holes. YES! Through bleary eyes I saw a clear plastic cage in which something was moving. Something furry. YES! I dropped to my knees and dumped my other presents unceremoniously to the floor, only slightly puzzled by how small the cage was. Did they get me a baby monkey?! YES! I pressed my face to the cage.

NOOOO! I threw myself backward, screaming. The fuzzy thing inside the cage was not a monkey. Not even a baby monkey. The thing inside the cage, the thing I’d just had my face right next to, was the biggest tarantula I had ever seen. I don’t like to think that I was a wussy when I was thirteen, but I did have a pretty healthy fear of spiders. They just freaked me out—and the bigger they were, the more they gave me the willies.

Now, some kids seem to like tarantulas. They let them crawl around on their arms, and they even pet them as if they aren’t poisonous bugs because those children are stark raving mad. I was not, and despite my older brothers’ assurances that I would come to like that giant spider, I never did. My parents made me keep him in my bedroom, which gave me nightmares for weeks. He was not cute or lovable. He could not wear a tiny fez or pick people’s pockets. And I never once took him to school.

I could not bring myself to touch that spider as he scrabbled around in his cage under the tree, but what I did do that heartbreaking Christmas morning was swear to myself that I would be better than my parents had been to me. I vowed that if a child of mine ever asked for a little monkey as a furry little friend, I would not hesitate to grant that wish.

And now, back in the present, at the breakfast table with my own daughter, all of it came flooding back to me, and I thought how truly glad I was that she had asked for a ferret instead of a monkey.

“Absolutely not,” I said again. “A ferret is out of the question.” So she stormed off to her room.

The holidays are hard. Joyful, but hard.

Who Loves You?

As I’m putting inscribed candy hearts into the last of my Valentines (Be Mine…Luv U…Text Me) I can’t help thinking that the only thing that ultimately matters in marketing is the relationship between the brand and its audience. In the absence of a special relationship with its customers, a brand cannot help but drift toward commodity status. The question is, how do you build the kind of personal relationship that supports a premium position for your brand?

Of course, a real personal relationship is a connection between two people, whereas a brand is a kind of useful fiction. Because of this, I believe it is helpful to think of your brand as if it were a fictional character. Audiences establish real emotional relationships with fictional characters all the time, that’s what the suspension of disbelief is all about. Without it, no one would ever cry at the movies.

For a marketer, the question becomes, what kind of character is your brand? Especially, what is the objective it pursues and what are the conflicts it wrestles with in pursuing that objective. Understanding the brand as a character is the key to developing a relationship in which the audience identifies with the brand and feels connected to it–a relationship, to put it in story terms, in which your customers feel like they know who your brand is, what it believes and how it thinks.

I could use your help with this exploration, if you are interested. I’d love to know if this metaphor–the brand as a character–seems useful to you as you approach the idea of building the relationship between a brand and its audience. Is it meaningful to you based on your own experience? And if so, could you describe the character of a brand to which you feel some personal connection? What has the brand done or said that led you to feel connected?
A long time ago a wise anthropologist who had (like me) drifted inadvertently into the world of marketing, taught me this:

Most brands spend their time desperately trying to get their customers to love them. Really successful brands manage to demonstrate, by their behavior, that they love their customers.
Happy Valentine’s Day!

Co-Opting? T’is the Season

I hate travelling for the holidays, but there I was, crammed into the middle seat on another airplane on Christmas Eve while a pinch-faced male flight attendant in a Santa Claus hat huffily reminded people that their primary storage space was under the seat in front of them, NOT in the overhead bins, as if the *travelers* were the ones who had overbooked the flight and instituted fees for checked baggage. The fairly large, middle-aged lady sitting next to me, and coincidentally also wearing a Santa Claus hat, sighed dramatically and said, “He’s got no respect for what that hat stands for.”

I tried hard not to register in any way that I had heard her comment or was the least bit interested in beginning a conversation.

“There’s so little Christmas spirit in the world today,” she continued. “It’s like people have completely forgotten what Christmas is all about.” She paused in an apparent attempt to leave me an opening to interject.

“I’m Sally, by the way,” she said after a long moment. I glanced around at the nearby seats, considering my options.

“Let me remind you all, this is a completely full flight,” the pinch-faced attendant barked, cutting off any possibility of escape.

“Hi Sally, I’m Jim,” I offered reluctantly.

“Good to meet you, Jim,” Sally said. And then, without further preamble, she launched into an impassioned tirade about the commercialization of Christmas, which, she suggested, was a relatively recent development that had begun sometime after her own golden childhood and which was now reaching an unbearable peak.

Not that my eyes glazed over, but this got me thinking of a way we commonly fool ourselves with story. It seems like, down through the ages, we humans have repeatedly told ourselves the story that *commercialism, exploitation and cynical thinking are recent developments and becoming more pronounced as time goes on.* You can find laments about this in ancient Greek, Latin and Egyptian, and yet we continue to perceive the issue as being about the specific things going on in the world around us rather than the things going on inside all of us, always.

An example is our belief that the commercialization of Christmas began within our own lifetimes. I hate to say it, but most of the current Christmas tradition celebrated in America seems to have been fabricated starting around 1820 as part of a successful attempt, mostly spearheaded by merchants, to refocus the boisterousness of a population at loose ends and flush with unaccustomed abundance away from rioting and looting and toward buying things.

You see, prior to modern times, January was a very interesting month. The arrival of January meant that the crops were harvested, so there was less farm work to keep people busy and they had time to party. The livestock had just been butchered because it was cold enough for the meat to keep but there was a short window of time in which it was at its peak of palatability, so there was a lot of feasting. Also, the first batches of beer were ready to be drunk, which is what vast swaths of the population were at the onset of January–ready to be drunk. They had too much time on their hands, a short-lived overabundance of food that was going to be followed by a long period of want, way too much alcohol and they were facing the prospect of a long, bitter winter. Plus, they were coming out of thousands of years of a feudal tradition in which January was the “season of Misrule” during which masters and servants reversed roles and the poor could accost the well-to-do and demand gifts of food, alcohol and money as a kind of social-pressure-relief valve. This is actually the basis of many Christmas carols, which otherwise seem kind of inexplicable. *Now bring us our figgy pudding and bring it right here! We won’t go until we get some!*

However, the seasonal traditions of drunken over-indulgence and ritual extortion of the wealthy that filled a functional social role in monarchies didn’t go over very well in democratic America with its burgeoning middle class and its capitalist economy. In America, drunken revelers didn’t accost noble lords and ladies who’d earned their fortunes based on inherited land and holdings, but hardworking business people who didn’t feel like they owed any particular debt to the masses. The great experiment of American democracy, coupled with the beginnings of the industrial revolution, caused great social upheaval that was profoundly affecting everything, including Christmas. The holiday frequently turned into an excuse for licentious behavior, rioting in the streets and looting of shops that generally made the season such an unsafe time to go outdoors that the celebration of Christmas was actually officially outlawed in some major cities.

And so a conscious effort was brought to bear in the early 1820’s, spearheaded by business owners, to change Christmas from a drunken carnival of public excess into an idyllic domestic celebration built on a foundation of “selfless generosity” that would require the exchanging of gifts. They hand-selected and outright fabricated “traditions” like hanging stockings to be filled with presents and exchanging Christmas cards. Commercialism isn’t the bane of our current Christmas tradition, but its foundation. Even our modern version of Santa Claus was formulated as the figurehead of this domestic/commercial movement, built from a combination of the gift-giving Saint Nicholas, the British Father Christmas and various pagan figures including Odin, Cernunnos and the Green Man. Santa’s fur-lined suit and cap are both holdovers from the wild Green Man, as are his reindeer Donder (Thunder) and Blitzen (Lightning). His red hat is probably a corrupted blend of Saint Nicholas’ bishop’s mitre, Odin’s pointy wizard cap and the Green Man’s hooded cloak.

Which is what I was thinking as I watched the white fluff ball at the tip of Sally’s Santa hat bob energetically while she emphatically shook her head. “It just seems so wrong that all these brands and stores and everybody are glomming onto our Christmas traditions, using them to sell stuff and then not even wanting to call the holiday by its proper name,” she concluded. She sighed mightily and then stared at me expectantly, perhaps waiting for me to commiserate. I briefly toyed with telling her that Christmas, as she knew it, really was about commercialism. That there really was a Santa Claus, but he wasn’t the selflessly generous and sprightly old elf from her childhood, just an odd combination of ancient Norse Gods, pagan nature spirits and misappropriated saints invoked by merchants to sell presents and Coca-Cola. That what was bothering her was that she was getting older rather than that the world was changing. That her perception that the state of the universe was devolving into corruption and commercialism was a story as old as humanity and one we all tell ourselves in order to avoid facing the harsh reality that we are sliding into old age.

So I did.

And let me tell you, it is possible to make a four-and-a-half-hour, middle seat, Christmas Eve flight significantly more uncomfortable than it has to be just by saying the wrong thing. Even if it is true.

P.S. If you are interested in learning more about the American Christmas tradition and the origins of Santa Claus, check out The Battle for Christmas written by Stephen Nissenbaum and Santa Claus, Last of the Wild Men by Phyllis Siefker, both books to which I am deeply indebted for much of the information in this post.