There are moments in advertising history that make you sit back and think: someone got extraordinarily lucky, and also possibly paid. The Hershey’s Kisses Christmas bells commercial — that deceptively simple festive clip in which a row of foil-wrapped chocolate lumps tinkle out We Wish You a Merry Christmas like the world’s most delicious handbell choir — is one of them. It has aired every single holiday season since 1989. It cost roughly the same as a decent pub lunch to produce. And, in a twist that should make every overworked creative director weep silently into their mood board, it was essentially made up on the spot.
The Hershey’s Kisses Christmas bells: born of desperation, aged like fine chocolate
The year was 1989. Someone at The Hershey Company presumably needed a Christmas advert and had either run out of ideas, time, or both — a feeling familiar to anyone who has ever tried to wrap presents on Christmas Eve. The solution arrived in the form of a gloriously minimal concept: line up some Kisses, film them wobbling slightly, add a jaunty little tune. Done. Off to the pub. The whole thing runs for about fifteen seconds, which is roughly the amount of time it takes to unwrap one of the chocolates themselves, a process that feels considerably longer when you’re hungry.
Furthermore, the advert features no humans, no narrative arc, no emotional journey, and absolutely no dialogue. It is, in the most literal sense, just chocolate being musical. And yet, somehow, it has lodged itself in the collective American psyche with the tenacity of a carol singer who doesn’t understand the concept of a polite hint. Generations of Americans now associate the gentle tinkling of bells with the urge to consume a small foil hat made of chocolate. Pavlov would be absolutely delighted.
Why brilliant accidents are annoyingly more effective than actual effort
The advertising industry spends billions of dollars annually attempting to manufacture exactly this kind of emotional response in consumers. Teams of people with expensive haircuts and subscriptions to obscure design magazines agonise over fonts, colour theory, and whether the protagonist should have a dog or a cat. Meanwhile, somewhere back in 1989, a person pointed a camera at some chocolates and accidentally created an immortal piece of cultural shorthand. The universe, as ever, has a magnificent sense of humour.
It’s worth noting that Hershey’s Kisses themselves are a product of spectacular simplicity — invented in 1907, they are essentially just a small dollop of chocolate wrapped in foil with a little paper flag sticking out, like a tiny edible surrender. There is something poetically appropriate about the world’s most effortless chocolate having the world’s most effortless Christmas advert. Consistency, at least, has been achieved.
Lessons from the laziest genius in festive television
Consequently, the Hershey’s Kisses Christmas bells clip has become one of the longest-running Christmas commercials in American television history. It airs each year with the reliability of a slightly drunk uncle at a family gathering — expected, oddly comforting, and impossible to remove. Hershey’s has, very sensibly, never tampered with it. There are no reboots. No gritty reimaginings. No celebrity cameos. Just the bells. Just the chocolate. Just the mild, inexplicable joy of watching confectionery perform a carol.
Meanwhile, in Britain, we have been busy spending approximately forty-seven million pounds per year on John Lewis Christmas adverts that make grown adults cry in supermarkets. Different approaches, one must concede. However, neither strategy — weeping pensioners nor wobbly chocolate — is objectively wrong. Christmas advertising exists in its own moral universe, ungoverned by normal standards of logic or restraint.
The accidental legacy of the Hershey’s Kisses Christmas bells lives on
In the end, the story of the Hershey’s Kisses Christmas bells advert is a deeply reassuring one for anyone who has ever panicked, winged it, and somehow produced something magnificent. It is proof that occasionally, the universe rewards a complete lack of preparation with decades of warm brand recognition and genuine public affection. It is also, frankly, proof that chocolate makes everything better — a thesis most of us had already independently reached by approximately age seven. So this Christmas, as the bells tinkle out their cheerful little tune for the thirty-sixth year running, raise a Hershey’s Kiss to the nameless genius who simply didn’t have time to overthink it.
Read the original story at Cracked – Weird.
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