As anyone from Oklahoma call tell you, the holiday season hasn't started until we begin hearing the ubiquitous, seemingly timeless BC Clark Anniversary Sale jingle. Indeed (and this is no news to anyone in the Sooner State) the jingle is a legitimate Christmas Carol in Oklahoma. A simple YouTube search leads to videos of people singing the song in the mall (this clip, I was surprised to discover, contains a very short clip of a high school girlfriend of mine), elementary school students, and a college chorus from OCU singing the song in concerts, Okie celebrity Megan Mullally singing the jingle on Jay Leno's show, and Oklahoma Baptist University students singing the song in chapel. The fact that this is not our state's official Christmas carol can only be seen as an oversight by our state legislature.
It might be easy to look at this phenomenon as a sign that Christmas is indeed an over-commercial holiday, or that even our holiday memories are commodified. One might say, "hey, their favorite Christmas carol is a jingle for an incredibly expensive jewelry store. That says everything I need to know about this rotten X-mas stuff. Bah, humbug." But I see it rather differently.
When I was at Harding, Christmas-time would roll around and, separated from home, we would begin to walk around the campus singing the jingle. Invariably, we would do this in a group of people from all over the country singing Christmas carols, and the song would make an appearance. As those of us from Oklahoma chimed in, folks from other parts would look at us askant as we skipped through the well trodden 32 seconds of the Okie classic. And, for those of us longing for home, the song was a way to connect.
The song was, in fact, how we found one another. You always knew the Oklahomans by the jingle. With admitted hyperbole, I would compare our singing of the song to ancient Christians meeting one another in the streets and asking "are you of the Way?" When you heard the song, you knew you were among brethren.
The point is, and this what makes the jingle so great, in a world where so much is becoming homogenized and where regionalism is dying, the jingle and the tradition it has spawned are profoundly local. A 32 second TV spot in the 45th largest TV market has somehow managed to become a social glue. Knowing and singing the song gives those of us from Oklahoma a sense of inclusion, and ties us to the history of our people. It is what, in a strangely cohesive way, seperates Us from Them. No matter where in the country we run into another Okie, we can sing the song and we can know that we are neighbors; we are "of the way."
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