Retrospective

This year, I think Christmas began making appearances on television commercials about the time school was back in session…maybe…I don’t know…it was early.

It could be a cost-saving production measure or because we love them so much that we see some of the same Christmas commercials played year after year. While I do not look forward to Christmas shopping, crabby shoppers, busy parking lots, crying kids in carts, the squeaky noise snow-laden boots make walking around department stores, germs on cart handles and the heightened level of pre-holiday stress – I do look forward to those commercials. There are a few that stand out, like the Hershey’s one with the foil-wrapped kisses that sound like hand bells and one I’m sure you’ll all remember.

Sadly, it’s this one I remember most and look forward to for nostalgic reasons, that I haven’t seen this year.

Christmas was definitely my Mom’s holiday. She was the best gift-getter I know. She either made you something or found something at an obscure shop, garage sale or second-hand store – the kind of perfect thing you’d never find in a whole year of shopping. On rare occasions, she might buy you something – but it was those other gifts that really stood out in the wrapping paper carnage of the living room floor on Christmas morning. She decorated for Christmas like nobody’s business and always fixed a holiday meal that couldn’t be beat. In a lot of ways, with her birthday being just days before Christmas and her name being “Carole” as in Christmas Carole, it was though she was meant to love the holiday and make it larger than life.

Every single year as far back as I can remember, we had a little game to see who could announce one of our favorite Christmas commercials first. It was a coffee commercial where a boy named “Peter” would come home for the holidays just as his idyllic family was waking up on what must have been Christmas morning. The first one of us to see the commercial each holiday season would yell, “Peter is home!!”

This usually brought about smiles, laughter and marveling at how Peter hasn’t changed a bit since we saw him last year. It was, after all, the same commercial year after year. I believe the commercial must have been shot sometime in the early 80s and I am guessing Peter may have been returning home from college. His family, all neatly dressed in their best holiday jammies and robes, awake at the scent of Folgers Coffee brewing on the stove downstairs. In all the years we watched the commercial, we’d joke about various elements of the commercial – how Peter wore the same thing last year, when was Peter finally going to graduate, how is that no one in their family ever got old or couldn’t they all be more prepared next year and actually be awake when Peter got home? Or…shouldn’t somebody by watching little sister who seemed to be roaming around the house by herself in the early morning hours? Or…who forgot to lock the front door again this year?

Silly stuff, I know, but in a lot of ways, Peter arriving home in the form of a television commercial was kind of like the herald of Christmas holidays coming forth.

In the years since my Mom died, I still waited for that commercial each year and when I saw it, I’d smile and think of her.

So, if by some chance I’ve missed it this year and you’ve seen it, you can be the first one in your house to announce it – and then send me an e-mail or post a comment below…all you have to do is write “Peter is home!”

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By the way, I just found the commercial online…click here if you’d like to watch it and reminisce with me.