Apple, John Lewis/Elton John Christmas Ads Are Actually Pretty Awesome

A new Christmas ad from Apple is one of the better ones this year. 

Most everyone who knows me understands that I'm not all that into Christmas.

I'm especially not into the constant onslaught of holiday ads, most of which are stupid, a waste of time, and just harangue you to buy, buy, buy.

The unmistakable message in these ads is you are a horrible person if you don't buy the perfect material gift. If you don't make Christmas memorable and perfect for everybody, you're a failure.

Some ads are better. At least they try to give an uplifting message. Like this year's offerings from Apple and John Lewis, the British retailer.  Yes, the purpose of the ads is to get you to buy Apple products and merchandise from John Lewis. Bur they do seem to go beyond the consumerist intent and remind us there are other things to think about.

First, I'll tackle the Apple ad, then get into John Lewis/Elton John, which I have more mixed feelings about.

In the Apple ad, I nice Pixar-like production called "Share Your Gifts," a young woman is seen in her apartment with her dog, writing or creating art on her Apple laptop, printing the work out, then being bitterly disappointed in her talent and stuffing the papers into a box.

The young woman is obviously creative and bright, but fears sharing her talent with anybody. Maybe they won't like it. Maybe they'll think her talent is stupid or something.

The dog finally takes matters into his own hands, pushing the apartment window open and sending the papers from the box flying out into the gusty, snowy city where they live.

The woman frantically runs outside trying to collect the papers, but to her horror,  they blow onto the clothes and into the hand of passersby. Those passersby look at what's on the papers, and their reactions are completely different from what she expected.

The soundtrack makes the ad complete. It's the marvelous song "Come Out and Play" by Billie Ellish.

Here's the ad



Every year, John Lewis, the British retailer, releases an elaborate Christmas season ad meant to touch everybody who sees it.

Some bah-humbugs usually hate them. I'm personally not fond of the Christmas season, so I skew to the bah-humbug crowd. Still, a good ad is a good ad, so I do get all verklempt if the ad touches all the right emotional buttons.

Elton John is the subject of this year's John Lewis Christmas ad.

Usually, John Lewis comes through. This year, I have mixed emotions. The ad this year is certainly touching. And it involves Elton John. I've always been a big fan of his. Ever since I was a little kid.

This year's ad shows Elton John, this year, sitting at a little piano in a modest living room lit up with a Christmas tree.

The piano, we think, is probably one he got as a young kid. It shows him playing three notes, then launching into the familiar chords of "Your Song." He's been through a lot, and at age 71, the ad does not mask the time that has passed.

The ad then journeys backwards through Sir Elton John's life. It goes through recent concerts, his wild days as the ultimate international star in the 1970s, back to when he recorded that beautiful love tune "Your Song," which basically launched his career. Then we see him in small clubs, wowing people with his talent.

It goes back further, with a very young Elton performing at an elementary school recital, with his confident, encouraging mom in the audience. Then it goes back further, on Christmas morning, when he unwraps the piano his mother gave him.

As a toddler, Elton looks at the piano, and plays three simple notes. Then we go back to present-day Elton, and he plays those same three notes, looking wistful and emotional, wistful and grateful.

The reason I have mixed emotions over this ad, is I just hate how companies these days stretch to find "synergy" with current pop moments, with the cooperation with current pop stars. Elton John is on his big farewell tour currently.

It looks like John Lewis is hanging its pitch on this current pop moment, and Elton John is promoting his tour by hooking up with some big retailer.

Still, the ad is touching and to be honest,  it does have a great message. The tagline at the end of the ad says, "Some gifts are more than just a gift."

No pressure here.  It looks like John Lewis expects you to buy your loved ones something as life-changing as that piano Elton John got as a little kid.

But still. I can think of numerous things that kind people have done for me over the years. On the surface, those nice gestures were no big deal. It might have been a thoughtful compliment, a supportive word when I was down, a joke when I needed it

The people who did these things for me probably don't even remember them. But they had a profound influence on my life. Maybe not as big as Elton John's piano, but significant enough. I'll always cherish and remember those giving, warm moments people gave me.

I'm sure we've all had the benefit of these random moments people gave is that helped us so much. I also hope that I've done things that, however subtlely, changed the direction of someone's life. I bet you hope that, too.

I hate the Christmas season because of the manufactured pressure to give the perfect gift, decorate just perfectly, and just be shallow consumers.

The John Lewis ad does expects us to engage in that superficial buying to create some commercial idea of a "perfect" holiday.  The part of our modern Christmas culture that I hate.

But I hope the ad, intentionally or not, also encourages us to dig deep, or maybe not so deep. Perhaps just a kind word. A compliment to somebody who thinks they don't deserve it. Or even just a smile in the long, boisterous line at the big box store.

You never know what just a mellow, friendly, brief gesture can do to a person. That person's life.

Anyway, you be the judge. Here's that John Lewis/Elton John ad. Tell me what you think:

A Young Gardener Just Thrilled The Hell Out Of Me

Keynote speaker Ian McKenna wowed and
inspired us at the Gardener's Supply Company
annual meeting last month.

Last month, my employer, Gardener's Supply Company in Burlington, Vermont, held its annual meeting.

We're an employee-owned company. Everybody who works there, including me, has a stake in it. So the annual meeting is a great chance to look over our financials, see where we've been, learn where we're headed.  

Each annual meeting features a keynote speaker, almost always somebody from outside the company who gives us inspiration and information meant to propel us forward and keep doing what we're doing.  

This year's keynoter was, of all people, a 13-year-old kid named Ian McKenna from Austin, Texas. He was easily - by far- the best keynote speaker we've ever had at Gardener's Supply.

Some background: Gardener's Supply is big on giving back to the community. That's one of the reasons why I work there.

I know the following is a shameless plug, but bear with me. It's good. This year, we're promoting something called Garden To Give. We're inviting our customers - anyone from newbies to hard-core gardeners  -  to agree to give away some of their summer produce to food shelves and people who just need food. Many of us Gardener's Supply employees are taking the pledge, too.

So, back to our 13-year-old kid. His altruism started in 2012 when his younger sister, then in first grade, was in school talking about Christmas traditions around the world, but one girl in the class burst into tears.

The girl said, "Santa's never come to us, he hates us because we're poor."

Ugh.

When Ian heard that story, he and his family decided to show up on Christmas morning at the girl's house with a carload of toys and food.

That had such an effect that a few months later Ian found out a student at school only ate breakfast and lunch provided at school with no dinners because the family was too poor, he knew he had to act again.

So he started a garden at Oak Hill Elementary school, and that people who were hungry could come there and collect fresh produce. He also opened a garden at another school, and in the first year grew 750 pounds of vegetables.  The next year, it was over 1,000 pounds of food.

I'm as guilty as anyone in my garden. Sometimes I surprise myself with more produce than I can handle. I give some away, or live on a diet of, say, string beans for a week to get through the harvest. Or, sadly, some food gets thrown away.

I'm not sure I will grow a giving garden exactly like the one highlighted on the Gardener's Supply how-to website. (I'm not the biggest fan of kale)

But surely I can give something - produce, time, volunteer work, money.

If Ian can do that much good, maybe I could at least do a fraction of it. If Ian as a teenager pulled off this much good stuff, we can all do a little, right?

Here's a video from Laura, from her YouTube channel, Garden Answer, with more on Garden to Give:

A Town In Vermont Remembers Veterans, A Cemetery And My Dad

The Whipple Hollow Cemetery in West Rutland, Vermont
looking immaculate thanks to the hard work of many
town residents. Thanks to Ken and Jean Heleba for photo.  

Years ago, my dad, Red Sutkoski, restored an old cemetery in a remote corner of his hometown of West Rutland, Vermont.

He loved his projects, and the outdoors, so he spent a lot of time at the cemetery, clearing TONS of brush, trying to prop up old gravestones, planting flowers and erecting a flag pole at the Whipple Hollow Cemetery.

It was a huge project. People stepped forward to help him by excavating rocks and debris, donating flowers, and doing whatever it took to make the cemetery whole again.

Red's project - and the town's great help with it - caused quite a little stir, garnering publicity from the Associated Press and the Boston Globe, among others.  Dad had a great sense of history, and remembering the dead was important to him.

He thought that we all build on the shoulders of the people who came before him and us, so we need to honor everyone who came before us, and remember the contributions they made. ,

Now dad has passed on, having slipped away at the age of 95 back in January.

A couple months after dad died, I stopped by the Whipple Hollow Cemetery. People had been trying to take care of it the best they could. Somebody had been mowing the grass. Some weeds had been pulled here and there.

But Red in his later years couldn't handle the big jobs. The woods was beginning to encroach again into the grave sites, wild grapevine was attacking everything at the cemetery and tall weeds rattled against the gravestones in the cold March wind.

The Whipple Hollow Cemetery was beginning to look sad again.

My dad, Red Sutkoski, at the West Rutland
World War II Memorial unveiling last August 

April 24, which would have been my dad's 96th birthday, was a sunny, pleasantly cool day. Me, my siblings, our husbands and partners and nephews, I think there were eight of us, went to the Whipple Hollow Cemetery to do a needed cleanup.

We got a lot done. We removed piles of broken branches and grapevine and stuffed it into the woods, hiding the mess. We raked away tons of leaves and weeds. We didn't get the whole cemetery done, but it definitely looked better.

And Red was smiling down on us. Because the cemetery he'd worked on brought the family together that day.

We laughed and enjoyed ourselves as we worked and visited and joked with each other as we cleaned up the cemetery on that bright April afternoon.

It's exactly what Red would have wanted on his birthday.

Come to find out the whole town of West Rutland, it seems, is also thinking about the Whipple Hollow Cemetery.

Forgive me, here, because I don't know the names of most of the people who have been helping, but I do know the town has the cemetery's back. And the backs of all those who came before them.

I know Stanley Dziubek has been up there at Whipple Hollow, clearing a LOT of brush and grapevine that we missed earlier, and doing a ton of other work. My sister Laurie tells me a nice woman in West Rutland who has donated flowers to dad for the Whipple Hollow Cemetery in the past, has done so again.

People raised a flag on the cemetery flag poll, and planted American flags at gravesites.

Today is Memorial Day, when we remember the veterans who served our country and thank them for their incredible service (Red was a veteran, too!)

People from West Rutland have been called "Stone peggers," a legacy of marble quarry labor riots back in the 1930s.

Metaphorically, West Rutlanders have been embracing the grave stones at Whipple Hollow Cemetery.  They remember the importance of the past, and the people who lived in those days.

Like my dad, Westsiders know they've built their lives on the shoulders who came before them, like those buried back in the 19th century in this cemetery.

They're remembering the veterans who served. They're remember my dad, which is an honor for the Sutkoski family. They're remembering the people who built West Rutland, They're honoring the way people in this rugged little town help each other out, and honor memories.

Want more proof? Just check out the amazing World War II memorial in front of the West Rutland Town Hall. That was another major community-wide undertaking that drew in the whole town.

The unveiling of that memorial last August was one of the final  public events my father went to, and as a World War II veteran, he told me how humbled and proud he was of the way West Rutland remembered its veterans.

I guess you could call the warmth and giving and remembrance as seen at the Whipple Hollow Cemetery a new form of being a "stone pegger."

I'm proud to be a West Rutland Stonepegger.

Christmas 2013's Worst Grinch; And An Anti-Grinch Can't Catch A Break

Congratulations go out to Janice Tully, 49, of Hyannis, Mass. who gets this year's award for worst Christmas Grinch.

Janice Tully, this year's Grinch Of The Year
Award nominee.  

According to WBZ-TV in Boston, Tully volunteered to take two families with five children in total to a Toys For Tots event in which the families, which couldn't afford all the Christmas trappings.

The families would collect the toys, get driven back home by Tully and have a wonderful Christmas.

So far so good.

But them, once all the toys were packed in Tully's car, she zoomed off, stealing all the toys and left the families stranded, according to WBZ.  The families had to take a taxi home, without the toys, of course.

According to WBZ

"When Tully returned home, she told her neighbors the toys were gone.

Candida Pina was one of the victims. 'I said, 'why are you doing this to my children, not to me, why are you doing this to children at Christmastime,?'"

If Tully had an an answer, it wasn't forthcoming. course.

Police said they found some of the stolen toys in the trunk of Tully's car. Police said Tully wouldn't tell them what she did with the rest of the toys.

She's charged with felony larceny of property.

Of course the police are the least of Tully's problems. Boy, is the Internet and the world going to hate on her!!   Oh well, she should have thought of this before.

Luckily, Toys for Tots came through and replaced the toys Tully allegedly stole, and, as one of the kids involved said, Santa came after all. Phew!

Next, we have really a nice guy named Joel Testa. He's a wealthy Ohio developer brought about 50 homeless people to a very nice restaurant he owns and gave them a four-star meal.

Again nice gesture. It gave the homeless some needed food, gave them an great experience to remember and showed them some respect.

Not if you read the troll comments at the bottom of various articles about this I read on line. Few people congratulated him. 

The criticism ran this way: Some of the money to pay for this was donated by friends, plus it was his restaurant, so he didn't pay much.

I say, so? At least he contributed something.

Other critics said it only benefitted a few people. Why didn't he just do some simple foods, or MRE's and distribute them to more people who were needy? 

Yeah, that's really respecting the homeless. Donate something that's barely edible.

Look, no act of charity is perfect. It doesn't reach all of the intended people, it isn't always distributed perfectly, people could have dug deeper into their pockets, etc.

But you have to start somewhere. 

I have to ask, how many of the trolls who were bitching about this guy donated something themselves?

Probably nothing. They were too busy trolling on Christmas Day.