Arnold Schwarzenegger wears an Armitron Diver

Jingle All the Way is a strange little artifact of 1996, and I mean that in the best way. Arnold Schwarzenegger is not playing a commando, a machine, or a man who can solve the problem by lifting something heavy. He is Howard Langston, a Minneapolis mattress sales executive who forgot to buy his son a Turbo-Man figure and spends Christmas Eve being punished by retail, traffic, Sinbad, and his own bad planning.

So what does that version of Arnold wear?

Not a Panerai. Not a giant action-hero watch. BAMF Style identifies the watch as an Armitron Analog-Digital Diver, a quartz piece with a black dial, large luminous markers, a single-line LCD at the bottom, a narrow black rotating bezel, and a black ridged rubber dive strap. It is exactly the kind of watch that makes sense if you stop thinking about Schwarzenegger and start thinking about Howard.

That is the trick here, I think. On Arnold, an Armitron feels funny at first because we know the later Schwarzenegger watch mythology: the oversized divers, the military-looking pieces, the watches that look like they could survive being thrown through a wall. But Howard is not that guy. Howard is a dad in corduroys trying to get through one impossible errand.

The watch is practical, cheap-ish, a little busy, and completely unglamorous.

Which is probably why it works.