Is the Jelly of the Month Club from ‘National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation’ Real?
What To Know
- The Jelly of the Month Club, featured as a disappointing gift in “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation,” plays on the popularity of “of the month” subscription clubs from the 1980s.
- Jelly of the Month Clubs are real and currently available, such as the one from the Made in Virginia Store, which offers monthly shipments of regional jellies and preserves as a gourmet gift.
Though classic Christmas movies are filled with countless heartwarming and touching moments, none is quite so relatable as the scene in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacationwhen Clark Griswold when he finally gets the chance to receive his highly anticipated Christmas bonus, but instead gets a membership to the Jelly of the Month Club. Some of us have also received silly gifts from our jobs or even relatives, even though we really hoped for some cold, hard cash. Which leads us to wonder, is there really a Jelly of the Month Club that you could purchase for a jelly-lover in your life?
The joke lands partly because “of the month” clubs were already familiar by the late ’80s. Subscription gifts like fruit clubs, cheese clubs, and book clubs were commonly advertised in catalogs and through mail-order companies during that era. A Jelly of the Month Club sounds like exactly the sort of gift a well-intentioned but detached boss might choose. It is not that jelly itself is bad but it just wasn’t even close to what Griswold was hoping for.
What makes the joke even more satisfying today is that Jelly of the Month Clubs are, in fact, real. Several companies have offered them over the years, and at least one currently available example comes from the Made in Virginia Store. Their Jelly of the Month Club is sold as a year-long subscription that ships a different Virginia-made jelly, jam, fruit butter, or preserve each month. The products featured include regional producers such as Graves’ Mountain, Rocky Branch Farm and Shawnee. The club is marketed as a gourmet gift experience, with shipments sent automatically once a month after a single upfront purchase. In other words, it is a genuine product, not a novelty created for the movie.
Ultimately, the Jelly of the Month Club joke endures because the problem was never the jelly. It was the expectation that came with it. Clark thought his bonus would bring recognition of a job well done and a long-dreamed-of pool. Instead, he got jelly and decades later, the joke still lands.
Now tell us, which Christmas movie do you make sure to watch every year during the holidays?
Remind 
PUZZLER: Holiday Movies
December 2022
Enjoy hours of fun as you puzzle along to all these holiday classics. The issue is packed with trivia, crosswords, word finds, Sudoku, scrambles, criss crosses and more!
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