You know what I miss during the Christmas season? Mission Paks. Mission Paks were small crates of fruit — mostly dried, occasionally fresh — which I doubt anyone ever bought for themselves. It was something you arranged to have shipped to someone else for the holidays, especially if you were in a climate where fruit trees were still putting out fruit and they were in some climate where it snowed. The subtext was that if you lived in the latter, you could not possibly obtain lemons or oranges unless a kindly person in California or maybe Florida sent them to you.
I don't know when Mission Pak went out of business but I miss it. And yes, I hear you saying there are plenty of companies around these days that will overnight fruit to anyone anywhere. That's not the point. I don't miss sending or receiving Mission Paks. I miss their commercials.
Some folks think the Christmas season officially starts when the decorations go up in retail areas. In my neck o' the woods, it was when the Mission Pak commercials started appearing every three minutes on TV or radio…with their catchy jingle. Wanna hear it? I'm embedding a short video of that jingle but let me caution you: Once you hear it, you can't unhear it. And once it gets into your mental repertoire, you may hear it over and over and over, day and night, for as long as you live.
Here it is. Don't say I didn't warn you…
I don't even know if Mission Pak was a year-round business but their commercials and little pop-up stores would pop-up around November. One year, my mother worked a few weeks in a seasonal job at a Mission Pak store in Beverly Hills. She brought an actual Mission Pak home and I found its contents largely inedible…and not because of my notorious food allergies. The fruit was largely inedible because it had been treated with preservatives to make it shelf-stable for the next millennium or maybe the one after.
But I think they functioned like fruit cakes. The point was not to send someone something they'd enjoy consuming. It was to send them something so they'd think you cared enough about them to send them something, period. It may have also suggested that while you did care about them, you didn't care enough to go shopping and pick a gift you thought they'd like and to wrap and ship it. You just cared enough to call the Mission Pak number — which from all those commercials, I still remember — and charge ten or twenty bucks to your BankAmericard.
Most people never eat the fruit cakes they received, either. A lot of people just rewrap them and sent them out as gifts for others.
My mother, when she worked for Mission Pak, told me that someone told her that the most welcome Mission Paks were the ones that came in those neat wooden crates. You could dump the fruit or leave it on your coffee table for a few decades as a decoration…but the crate actually came in handy. People, I see, still sell them on eBay.
Anyway, that's just about all I know about Mission Paks and way more than you wanted to know. And I'm sorry about the jingle. If you're like me, you'll hear it in your head for the rest of your life…but after a decade or two, maybe not quite as often. Sorry to do that to you but you can't say you weren't warned.