This is not to say that you should be an easy-hearted fool who just gives everything away in business. Quite the contrary, you should be a cheap son of a bitch who fights for every nickel and gets a reputation for never being cheated. It’s just that after you get done fighting and have determined exactly how far against the wall you can push the other guy, it’s a good policy, if possible, to take a step back and give him some breathing room. Over the long run, you’ll both breathe easier for it.

With the agency bankrolling me (even my test ads), business started to run as smoothly as clockwork. Across America people were buying our imperial chopsticks, phone headrests, police warning light, and handwriting analysis. But mostly they bought our plants. The items sold year-round—spring, summer, winter, and fall. But it was in the fall, particularly in those months before Christmas, when things really went wild. Everyone, it seemed, was ordering our items to give as holiday gifts. Our big surge, though, came at least a month earlier than it did in stores. People knew they had to allow at least a month to receive items ordered from the paper and so by the last week in November the flood of orders would drop considerably. People would order anything, it seemed, as long as they were sure they’d have it in time to put under their Christmas tree. Ironically, the main thing we were sending people to put under their Christmas trees were trees. This gave me an idea.

Why not sell people the Christmas trees themselves? I mean, everybody would want a Christmas tree. Not the regular big, bulky dead tree you bought on the corner and had to throw away, but a real live baby Christmas tree, the kind you could decorate and put on the coffee table. The kind you could replant outdoors after Christmas instead of putting in the trash. The kind that would live and grow and that you could redecorate every year. The kind of tree that every day of the year would remind you of Christmas.

This time I’d finally done what Irving Berlin did when he wrote “White Christmas.” I’d tapped into the deepest part of the American soul and I’d hit a wellspring. A Christmas tree with its own decorations (they were free, of course), which would live forever. Not all the nurseries in the world could fill the demand.

Thankfully, the agency was only able to place a quarter of the ads they wanted to because we had missed most pre-Christmas closing deadlines. In fact, only by guaranteeing in the ad that all orders postmarked by December 15 would be delivered in time for Christmas (provided the customer included $2 extra for the newly implemented Express Mail service) were we able to place ads as late as we did.