12/12/05: Kraft, The Heart of the Holiday Season. I come from a huge, Italian family, and while us filthy wops don't get a lot of things right, we know food. This commercial from Kraft would provide an endless sense of sacrilege to my family, suggesting that such purely pedestrian edibles as Stove Top stuffing and Velveeta cheese are all one really needs to make their family's holiday meal worthy of comparisons to the Last Supper. Don't get me wrong. I like Velveeta cheese and I'd pick a pan full of Stove Top over saving your life. Doesn't matter. If somebody tried to incorporate such things into my family's holiday meals, we'd put a hit out on them and crank Sinatra real loud during the pillow shot. I never knew better. It wasn't until being forced to split my holidays up between both my family and my girlfriend's did I realize that people really do phone it in with their holiday dinners. My ball and chain's relatives -- well, let's put it like this: They serve chicken parm on Thanksgiving. Not turkey. NO turkey. Just chicken parm. And I'm pretty sure they pick up the yams from Boston Market ten minutes before showtime. Again, this is only unacceptable in as far as what I grew up being taught. When it comes to the holidays, it doesn't matter if the food's any good so long as it took twenty hours to make. The commercial touts various Kraft products as the means of a simpler holiday celebration, but where's the fun in that? I'm not going to eat all of that disgusting stuffed squid my mother brings to my sister's house this Christmas Eve, but I'll be damned if I see her rip a Kraft label off one of the tentacles before putting it on the table. Click here to download this commercial! (.WMV, 5 MB) ....close this window!