Mad Men: Christmas Comes But Once a Year

The face of hip and cool

It's Christmas 1964 and the folks at SCDP are cutting back on the expenses of their Christmas party. That is, until Lee Garner Jr. announces that he is coming and is looking forward to the wild parties they are known for. Because Lucky Strike is SCDP's bread and butter, they must bend over backwards and kiss Garner's ass to keep the business intact. The honchos try to plan a much wilder party than they first intended and when Garner drops by, both embarrassment and craziness ensues. At first, I thought he wasn't going to show up, ala Big Night, but the guy did indeed make it to the party. The minute he makes his entrance, the guys and the girls start partying it up with a game of pass the orange and they all partake in a conga line. Yes, this is the wild party the man asked for. No joke, he is having a blast and this is wild for 1964. I'm guessing.

Meanwhile Freddy Rumsen, now a recovering alcoholic, is brought back as a consultant to work with Peggy on a campaign for Pond's cold cream. The two have an argument over the direction they should take. Freddy, neither a woman nor young, has a "by the numbers" approach of trying to market the cream to old ladies. Peggy thinks that a beauty product like Pond's can be made hip and modern by selling it to young women. Freddy grabs onto the young part of her idea but goes on to show what a dinosaur he is by suggesting they scare women into buying Pond's because if they don't take care of their skin, they won't find a man to marry. Peggy calls him out on his archaic way of thinking and he feels both old and hurt by her harsh words.

Peggy has a love interest this season. I don't know the actor or the character's name but he played Karl on Lost. We first saw him in the season opener and he introduced himself as Peggy's fiancé, though that was a lie. Peggy must really like him or maybe she got some self-esteem because she hasn't slept with him yet. She said she wanted to wait and he took that to mean that she is a virgin. Peggy doesn't correct him. Maybe a part of her wanted to still be the innocent girl before the pregnancy, the cheating, and the sleeping around. She wants to have an old fashioned kind of love so who better to ask for advice than Mr. Old fashioned himself, Freddy Rumsen. Freddy suggests that she wait so that Karl can respect her and their relationship. I couldn't tell how much time passed between this conversation but the next thing we know, Peggy has slept with Karl and she is still going along with the story that it was her first time.

Something went on with Sally that I think will play out later in the season but I still don't know where they are going with it. Part of me thinks that they are trying to make Sally a little nutty so that she'll end up some flower child at Woodstock. Maybe if the show goes on long enough, she'll be seen doing coke at Studio 54. I'm not really sure but the combination of a divorced family, a cold heartless mother, and the way she's handled to not express her feelings is going to lead to a damaged woman. And in this episode we see the return of that really weird and creepy kid we saw in season 1, Glenn. He was the neighbor that spent way too much time with Betty and looked at her inappropriately. I guess he's moved on to the next Draper female because we see him try to befriend Sally. She's already messed up and putting this crazy kid in her life just seems like no good waiting to happen. Glenn breaks into the Francis/Draper house and throws food around. To be fair, the door was unlocked so he just walked in. After messing up the kitchen, he leaves a friendship keychain on Sally's pillow, which Sally finds and smiles about.

Now to Don. Sigh. What can I say except that I am getting mighty tired of this guy having to hook up with someone every 5 minutes. The guy has no self control! There are 3 women we see Don interact with in this episode and I guess his loverboy skills are getting rusty because he only manages to sleep with 1 of them. Like many other girls in the typing pool, Don's secretary ends up having a quickie with the dripping drunk Don on his couch after the Christmas party. He forgot his keys and she drops them off at his apartment. Completely inappropriate by modern day standards but perfectly fine in the world of 1964 when women are still mere property. Women are just another cigarette, another drink, another thing to Don. Just some other vice so that he escapes the monotony and pain of being Don Draper. Boo fucking hoo. But unlike giving yourself liver failure with alcohol, his Lethario act leaves a string of collateral damage all over the place. This time, he left it at work, on the desk right by his door. The day after his escapade with the secretary, she is called into his office. Completely oblivious to his signature use 'em and leave 'em style. She is all smiles hoping for flirting or some acknowledgement of their night together. Don makes no mention of the sex or anything. Just some cryptic language about taking advantage of her kindness and thanks for the keys. He hands the poor girl a card with two $50 as her Christmas bonus. He might as well have left it on the nightstand, the jerk.

It's episodes like these that make me wish this show goes on through the 1970s. I want to see Don's head explode when women realize they can do more than be housewives or mistresses and they take to the street and demand equality. I want to see Don lose his mind when feminism has a stage and the standards of yesterday, the ones that Don benefits from, are deemed fucking insulting and archaic. Oh how I wish it so.

What this episode seemed to highlight time and again through everyone's respective story lines is the fleeting nature of modernity. Yes, maybe that's too easy to say about a show set in the 1960s but the episode got me thinking about how our own modern world will be viewed one day. The folks at SCDP were really having a crazy time passing an orange and they had no idea that one day parties would consist of kids putting pacifiers in their mouths while dancing to space music and dying of dehydration. But the conga line was modern, it was happening and hip and within the social norms of the 1960s, I imagine passing an orange from one's neck was damn racy. But what is hip and modern one year, is easily played out and old school the next.

I remember when The Simpsons first premiered (my favorite show of all time btw) it was discussed as the end of the American family. Here you had a kid getting choked and cussing on TV like you never heard before. Surely the first time I heard "bitch" on TV was in the episode Bart's Dog Gets An F. It was edgy, modern, and just insanely wild. Preachers scared you into not letting your kids watch it and even the first president Bush asked that America be more like the Waltons than the Simpsons. Well, those better times are Don Draper's womanizing booze hound days, which were just as amoral in their own right. We all just seem to drive this nostalgia train and when viewed by whatever modern world you happen to live in, the past is always wholesome and old-fashioned. Funny how the first few seasons of The Simpsons look so tame and are sentimentally family oriented against our modern backdrop.

This episode puts a mirror to our notions of modernity and what values we hold dear and where those values come from. Freddy's old fashioned ways and expectations of women are called into questions by Peggy, who sports a bouffant and would not be the poster child for modern by today's standards (maybe kitsch, sure). Yet, she was exactly that in her day. We recognize her as a trail blazer for women in the work place but she probably saw herself as a girl who got lucky and still had to deal with all the dicks in the room. I'm sure Freddy was all the rage in his day and he wasn't going to take his dad's authoritative shit. We can keep going further back into the jazz age, the victorian era, and probably all the way back to those crazy and super cool kids we call the apostles. Point is we'll all age, get old, be deemed old fashioned by a future generation of cool kids, and we'll die as unhip wrinkly dudes that hung onto their values and were out of touch with the modern world. No amount of Pond's cold cream can reverse those lines and wrinkles. We'll sit at our old computers that still used USB drives, listen to our tunes on obsolete iPods, and talk about the days when family values were about both parents going to work for 40 hours a week while they ate out every night of the week because neither parent knew how to cook, god damnit! And the kids were safe at home in the trusting care of their Xbox, their TVs, and the internet. Now those were the good old days, we'll say.