Getting Ready for Christmas: An Advent Calendar from Hallmark

It's not the first poem that P&PC ever encountered—that distinction probably goes to the quirky "I went to the animal fair" verse that dad used to recite—but it's pretty darn close. We're talking about the 24-line holiday poem printed verse by verse behind the 24 doors and windows of three brick houses featured in the tri-fold "Getting Ready for Christmas" Hallmark advent calendar pictured here. (That's panel one you see here; panels two and three follow in sequence below, concluded by a panoramic photo of the card completely opened up.)

Like the Hallmark Christmas card matchbook featured on P&PC about this time last year and pictured here, the advent calendar solicits an unusual amount of reader involvement to get at the poem; but unlike the matchbook, where the reader is invited to dismantle or deconstruct the poem matchstick by matchstick, the advent calendar asks the reader to help build the poem line by line and window by window in an act of constructive reading that runs parallel to, or perhaps even tropes, the houses that were built brick by brick to shelter them.

If you've spent any time around the P&PC office, the accentuated sequential nature of this window-by-window poem probably brings to mind the old rhyming Burma-Shave billboards that delivered poems in line by line (and sign by sign) units along American highways until the 1960s. Burma Shave's billboards awesomely staged the experience of the poetic line break by setting up signs/lines 100 feet apart from one another—thus letting the driver/reader ride in the exaggerated "white space" between individual lines for several moments. The advent calendar does the Burma-Shave poems one better, though. Because one is supposed to open one window or door every day for each of the 24 days leading up to Christmas, it effectively creates line breaks measured not in terms of seconds on the highway but in terms of days; that is, if the poem is read as intended, each line break in "Getting Ready for Christmas" is effectively 24 hours long!

As scholastically appealing as "Getting Ready for Christmas" is (we might go on to ask, for example, what sort of voyeuristic holiday experience Hallmark is asking us to have in opening all of these windows and doors as we let our fingers do the strolling, caroler-like, through the little neighborhood), we at P&PC value it more for reasons external to the card itself—for its family history. According to Mom (née Ann Salvatore), it was first given to her and her brother Jim in Cleveland, probably in the early 1950s. (Ann had it, or large parts of it, memorized if I remember correctly.) Then they sent it to my great-aunt Tillie Boye (née Matilda Danca) and her children in Lincoln, Nebraska, later that decade. Then the Boyes sent it back to Northeast Ohio for Ann to share with with my sister Trish and me (both Chasars) in the 1970s. Then Ann sent it to Tillie's son Alan and his Boye clan, living in Vermont, in 1988. Then Alan sent it back to the suburbs of Cleveland in the 2000s to share with Ann's grandchildren, my niece and nephew, Wayne and Julianna Grindle. Members of the Salvatore, Danca, Boye, Chasar, and Grindle families have thus been "Getting Ready for Christmas" via this poem for well over half a century.

This holiday season, we wish we could send the actual card to you—the extended P&PC family—as well. While we can't do that, we can give you the composite text of the 24-line poem here:

The guests are welcomed at the door
The gifts are piled upon the floor
The cook is making gingerbread
And all are waiting to be fed
The corn is popping almost done
Come and get it everyone!
A taffy pull is in full swing
Cheerful, merry voices ring
The stockings hang all in a row
Outside it has begun to snow
The younger tots have said their prayers
And now are fast asleep upstairs
But one sits by a candlestick to wait awhile for Old St. Nick
The older children laugh with glee and dance and caper 'round the tree
A train for Jack, a doll for Jill, a scarf for Anne and Gloves for Bill
Underneath the mistletoe Jane steals a kiss from her best beau!
Hot things to drink, good things to eat
For every child a special treat
The grown-up folks sit by the grate
The clock says that it's growing late
Everybody stops to spy the Christmas star up in the sky
The Christmas carols now begin
With everybody joining in
And all the doors are opened wide to welcome in the Christmastide!

MERRY CHRISTMAS

Using your imagination, perhaps you can experience something of the thrill this advent calendar poem offered and, in the process, open a few doors and windows onto where P&PC comes from. Happy holidays all.

Poetry & Popular Culture Hits PMLA

If you've got a little time on your hands and are looking for a bit of extra reading about this blog's favorite subject matter, check out "The Business of Rhyming: Burma-Shave Poetry and Popular Culture" which is in the brand new issue of PMLA (not the issue pictured to the left). The Poetry & Popular Culture office has written about Burma-Shave before, but this new essay contains almost—almost—as much as we have to say on the matter. The fact that we get to say it in PMLA—that bastion of academic criticism—makes it all the more sweet.

So, as a teaser, here's the first paragraph, which follows a quotation from Gertrude Stein's Everybody's Autobiography.

[A]nd it was there I first saw the shaving advertisements that delighted me one little piece on one board and then further on two more words and then further on two more words a whole lively poem. I wish I could remember more of them, they were all lively and pleasing.... I wish I could remember them I liked them so much.

—Gertrude Stein, Everybody's Autobiography

The theme of the New York Times Crossword on Wednesday, 30 April 2003, begins with the clue for 17 across: "Start of a roadside verse." That clue and four others—23, 38, 47, and 58 across—link to produce a rhyming answer that staggers through the crossword's grid not unlike the way the Burma-Shave billboards being quoted from were staggered in sets of six along highways in the United States for nearly forty years in the mid-twentieth century, before regulations limiting "visual pollution" helped bring the shaving oeuvre to an end: "THIRTY DAYS / HATH SEPTEMBER / APRIL JUNE AND THE / SPEED OFFENDER / BURMA SHAVE." While the crossword is not exactly what William Zinsser had in mind in 1964 when he claimed that the poems in the then recently discontinued advertising campaign had become part of "the national vocabulary," it is nonetheless a compelling piece of evidence on his behalf. "No sign on the driver's horizon gave more pleasure of anticipation," Zinsser eulogized in the Saturday Evening Post. "Roads are no longer for browsing."

Happy reading.

Poetry & Popular Culture Heroes: John Strachan

Just when Poetry & Popular Culture thought it knew every poetry superstar who walked down the red carpet of popular culture, along comes John Strachan, professor of Romantic Literature at the University of Sunderland and author of Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period. Okay, so we knew that Strachan was out there writing. A few years ago, we had occasion to talk about the comparative tonsorial poetics of early 19th-century England and mid 20th-century America, discovering the "barberous" verse connections between P&PC fave Burma-Shave and the British, Romantic-Era, New York City-based barber, poet, and master of self-promotion J.R.D. Huggins. And not too long ago we learned of Strachan's fondness for the poetry of late 18th-century pugilism. So he was on the office radar.

But nothing could have prepared us for Advertising and Satirical Culture in which Strachan walks seemingly straight out of the Romantic Era with the poetry of shoe blacking in one hand and the verse of bear-fat hair oil in the other. Bringing advertising jingles, parodies, and elaborate mock epics together with poetry and puffs written by the age's more recognizable literary figures—Byron, Coleridge, Crabbe, Dickens, Lamb, Wordsworth, and others—Strachan reconstructs an entire sphere of literary activity created and sustained not just by resourceful and ingenious copy writers but by canonical ones as well. Along the way, he manages to argue that some of what literary critics have long identified as the defining characteristics of "Romantic" writing—a focus on the individual, creativity, genius, originality, etc.—are, in fact, also defining characteristics of the age's advertising poetry. Popular poetry, he reveals, didn't have a monopoly on the commercial. And literary poetry, in turn, didn't have a monopoly on genius.

To go about showing this, Strachan spends two chapters surveying the landscape of advertising poetry and the responses it elicited among the literati. Advertisers not only quoted literary poetry in their puffs, but they imitated it, parodied it, and wrote all sorts of verses of their own as well. In turn, literary writers not only parodied advertising poetry to critique the excesses of commercial culture, but they found in such puffery what Strachan calls a set of "formal models for satire aimed elsewhere." That is, they borrowed the familiar, catchy, poetic discourse of advertising—and the figure of the shameless ad man—to critique a wide range of targets. Take, for example, Thomas Moore's 1826 squib lampooning two Tory figures (Poet Laureate Robert Southey and the editor of The New Times) by comparing them to snake oil salesman Dr. Eady (who hawked a surefire cure for syphilis):

Though many great Doctors there be,
There are three that all Doctors o'ertop,
Doctor Eady, that famous M.D.,
Doctor S-th-y, and dear Doctor Slop.
The purger—the proser—the bard—
All quacks in a different style;
Doctor S-th-y writes books by the yard,
Doctor Eady writes puffs by the mile!
Doctor Slop, in no merit outdone
By his scribbling or physicking brother,
Can dose us with stuff like the one,
Ay, and doze us with stuff like the other.

If Chapters 1 & 2 paint a picture of literary England in which advertising drove the writing of literature and literature drove the writing of poetic ads, then the remaining chapters in Strachan's book focus on advertising campaigns for individual products—shoe blacking, the national lottery, hair oils, and tonsorial services—and the responses those campaigns elicited. These are totally fun, sometimes hilarious chapters about the minutia of Romantic-Era life, but they also open a number of windows onto the politics (and poetics) of everyday life inherent in the most unassuming of consumer goods. Who would've thought, for example, that the period's great crinicultural debate—whether to use vegetable-fat hair oil or bear-fat hair oil—came about because of an emergency wartime tax on hair powder levied by William Pitt the Younger? To protest the tax, Pitt's political opponents began wearing their hair unpowdered, which understandably necessitated a need for some sort of gel, cream, spray, or mousse to help manage out-of-control locks. Hence the emergence of the hair-oil industry (and the eventual dissolution of the hair powder business) accompanied by an entire sub-genre of related verse. Consider Thomas Spence's "An Address to Mr. Pitt Accompanied by a Crop of Human Hair" which, Strachan explains, "defiantly declares that he is proud to wear his hair unpowdered, that he will be no 'guinea pig' (as those who paid the guinea tax were dismissively labeled) and that he hopes Pitt will slit his throat while shaving":

O Heaven-born minister of state,
This tail from off my swinish pate,
Most humbly I present it;
For since no powder may we wear,
Determin'd I've cut off my hair,
And to your honour sent it.

Know then vile Tory, I'm a Whig,
And will not be a Guinea pig,
To satisfy your craving;
Oh! that your razor would but slip
Three inches underneath your lip,
When you yourself are shaving.

A deadly gash I hope 'twould be,
To end your damn'd hypocrisy,
And rid us of a P-t.
A speedy peace I now pray for,
To finish this unlucky war,
Thus endeth my dull wit.

There's more where those stanzas come from, dear reader, so get your copy of Advertising and Satirical Culture today. Nine out of ten enthusiasts of poetry and popular culture recommend it.