Weirdest Vintage Christmas Ad

Decades of television explaining to people exactly what belonged under a tree, with a confidence that has not aged evenly at all.

The Ronco catalogue does a lot of the heavy lifting here and has earned the space. Ron Popeil sold a machine that attached buttons without sewing, a kit for tufting your own rugs at home, and a device whose entire function was frosting drinking glasses — all pitched as gifts a person would be delighted to unwrap. Elsewhere the assumptions are stranger than the products themselves: an entire genre of advertisement existed around giving a woman a vacuum cleaner for Christmas and then filming her evident delight at receiving it.

You are choosing among thirty-six advertisements, running from the sincerely odd through to the commercially catastrophic. The Star Wars Holiday Special and the Atari E.T. cartridge both appear here, and both are famous for reasons their makers never intended. Judge which has aged the strangest rather than which is worst — those turn out to be different questions with different answers.