The inescapable and ubiquitous Christmas songs, specials, etc -- and how us Jews helped create and embed them, have fought against them, and how some deal with it now -- fa-who dor-ay, fa-who dor-ay, ...

The white Christmases that Irving Berlin dreamed of weren't the earliest ones he used to know. ... watching his neighbors burn his family's house to the ground in a good old-fashioned, Jew-hating pogrom.
So it's no surprise that when Berlin got around to writing his great Christmas song in 1941, nearly half a century after his family had fled the shtetl of Mohilev for New York's Lower East Side, it was flatly devoid of Christian imagery. It is, for all that, a religious song. ...

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Crap. Why is it I always find the posts I really want to wax upon with eloquence when it's late, and I'm bone tired? Lindsay is such a bright and attractive woman. And she gets why this is so important. I like to think I do too.

Bottom line: total, complete bullshit drives much advertising in this country. Based on metrics and numbers from decades ago and cultures dead, ads are bought by companies who believe in well, a lot of crap, and who don't understand what their ad dollar does and doesn't buy them. Advertising entities aren't stupid; it's not like they're going to tell GM that their return on their billions is in fact much less than traditional MBA think suggests. Greatly like the political consulting class, advertisers have created an environment in which people continue to pay them despite the lack of profitable results.