Slim Tinsel Goes Rantmas Shopping

Slim Tinsel wishes to discuss the endless holiday treasures found online at The Bradford Exchange, but first we have to address the baby monkey in the room. To wit, the Bradford Exchange contains a disturbing number of baby monkeys.

Those of Slim Tinsel’s vintage will remember The Bradford Exchange, along with The Franklin Mint, as your go-to source for finding Civil War generals and NASCAR drivers emblazoned upon plates and coins. Available by subscription, each month you waited by the mailbox—would it be Dale Jr. or General Burnside this month? Or even the latest Styx release from the Columbia House Record Club. Before guaranteed delivery and tracking numbers, the mind reeled at what might arrive.

But The Exchange gathered in the boardroom and said, “You know what, we need more kitsch, and why waste a perfectly good licensing deal on plush toys when we can make The Nightmare Before Christmas shot glasses and Pirates of the Caribbean cuckoo clocks instead?” So they did. And Slim Tinsel rejoiced.

Calm down our religious culture warriors, The Exchange knows you can’t have a kitschy Christmas without a baby-Jesus-in-the-manager sculpture with a musical pillow that plays carols. Slim Tinsel forgot about the embroidered velvet pillow in the manager, but then we don’t read the Bible in any of those newfangled translations. Our personal favorite is the Archangels of Light Sculpture Collection, with Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel looking like the greatest glam rock band ever assembled, only with wings. In fact, you can easily confuse the heavenly boys with the KISS “Destroyer” Figurine Collection. Imagine that Battle of the Bands, literally for your soul.

That would be enough for most Exchanges, but not the Bradford. They also have a contract with the estate of Thomas Kinkade, Evangelicals’ beloved Painter of Light, a man so full of the Spirit he died of an alcohol and Valium overdose. Kinkade’s sentimental work tries to erase reality, a reality that included him once yelling “Codpiece!”¹ over and over at a Siegfried and Roy show and urinating on a Winnie the Pooh statue at a Disneyland hotel.²

Just to demonstrate the Kinkade magic, he also produced a nativity scene. Obviously it plays music. Please. But wait there’s more! A light casts a heavenly LED hue over the scene. And then, just when you thought the show was over, a projector casts stars and angels on your wall. Slow clap, Thomas. Our only quibble is that it requires batteries. Shouldn’t such a wonder miraculously operate under its own volition?

The world seemingly conquered, one day an eager young intern sent a memo to the CEO of The Exchange: you know what America is clamoring for, she asked? Lifelike baby monkeys. Unaware of this Jane Goodall (RIP) fever sweeping the nation, the boss fired up the So Truly Real doll studio (yes it exists), and the “Annabelle’s Hugs” Poseable Monkey Doll was born. Our first hugging monkey doll! the site breathlessly exclaims, as though Bradford Exchange stock had been plummeting due to their inability to deliver a hugging monkey.

If verbal, rather than tactile, communication is your monkey thing,³ the Keiko Interactive Monkey Doll makes five different sounds depending on pose, but then, don’t we all. The product gallery photos look like some sort of demented Baby Monkey of the Month Calendar. HMMMM . . . that gives Slim an idea, “Dear Bradford Exchange . . . ”

We can’t even discuss the human So Truly Real dolls because you need the King James Version of the 23rd Psalm and more alcohol and Valium than even Kinkade consumed (What we now like to call “taking the Bradford cure”) to walk that uncanny valley. You’re headed there now aren’t you?

1. The Rant chooses to believe this incident absolves Kinkade from all other transgressions
2. Resulting in a high five from the adjacent Eyeore statue
3. Did we ever dream of having the opportunity to write such a sentence? No, no we did not. Our gratitude is boundless