My first thought when I saw Old Navy’s new “Happy ALL-idays” commercial was: How clever, I can’t believe nobody came up with that term before. Then I watched it.
First you see the T.V. personality Keke Palmer emerging from a chimney in a Santa hat. “Expecting someone else?” she asks cheerily. “Ho-ho no! It’s the ALL-idays, and we are all about it!” What are these ALL-idays, you ask? Well, they look a lot like Christmas.
There’s also a token menorah on the hearth in the background, holding not candles but bulbs in blue and white but also red and green. [...] I don’t want ALL-idays. I want to light my menorah, make my latkes, and spend Christmas eating Chinese food and going to the movies without hearing another word about this fake holiday “season.”
I have a “holiday season” — just not in December. Ours is, frankly, much more of an authentic “season” — a month-long journey from Rosh Hashanah through Yom Kippur to Sukkot. That’s a great time to tell me “Happy Holidays” or, better yet, “Chag sameach.” You want to celebrate ALL-idays? How about letting my kids make up the pottery class they missed on Kol Nidre? How about not scheduling the science fair for the day after Passover Seder?
Tema, like me, went to public school, and she mentioned that her mom “made a whole big fuss” that the Christmas concert should be a holiday concert. “It was still Christmas songs, until they threw in that dreidel song,” she recalled.
Choice snippets from this screed:
I didn't even catch the "all-days" aspect, I thought it was just lazy speech considering the other catch-phrases in that awful commercial.