Bells and Ukeleles: The Sound of Happiness

In keeping with my lazy habit of writing about TV commercials too much, I want to bring to your attention a new(ish) trend in marketing. This is the trend in commercials of using bells and ukeleles, or bells and acoustic guitars as the go-to combo to convey happy moods. If you don't fast forward through all your commercials nowadays, you've probably heard some bell and ukelele filled music like this:

or this, with bells, whistles and ukeleles:

This kind of music is ubiquitous. For example the Lowe's chain of hardware stores really likes their bells and, well not ukeleles, but guitars. Anyway you can definitely recognize a style. Here's an example:

And another one:

And even cats love this music. Friskies uses it to advertise their (apparently hallucinogenic) cat food:

OK maybe these examples I found on Youtube mostly have bells and acoustic guitar and not ukelele, but I assure you the ukelele variety is out there, and best exemplifies this musical style. Just watch a little bit of TV and you'll see facsimiles of this music everywhere. It seems to me that at some point American advertisers decided that the combination of bells and ukeleles, or bells and acoustic guitars convey the sound of happiness. Why is this? Perhaps we associate ukeleles with Hawaiian vacations and Zooey Deschanel, and we associate bells with Christmas? I don't know why, but I do know this music is everywhere. Something's got to give. Pretty soon advertisers will need to stumble upon a new instrumental combo that we all can agree signifies a cheerful life. I suggest the tuba and xylophone.