Christmas Adverts – Not just for Christmas but for life?
Christmas is quite close now. More and more decorations are appearing. Lots of parties are being enjoyed. Excitement is mounting. And the Christmas TV listings are out, so we can all start planning our Christmas TV watching….
Inbetween the programmes on many channels, and an increasingly significant part of the Christmas build up, are the various large retailers’ and other companies’ Christmas adverts. This year, we have amongst them:
- a couple of supermarkets reinterpreting famous stories or events connected with their anniversary years
- a few that are simply just hard sell of products rather than anything special.
- at least one with animated vegetables
- one where a reindeer is brought to life by a girl’s imagination
- a couple that encourage us to just chill and stop worrying about making a good impressioN
- and then there’s Excitable Edgar whose over-enthusiasm to help people celebrate ends up making things worse, until he’s encouraged to take a more gently gently approach.
Each one highlights a different aspect of what seems to be an important feature in our Christmas celebrations nowadays. Which ones do you like the best? Which ones chime with your image of Christmas?
In addition to Excitable Edgar, there are three others that’ve particularly captured my imagination:
- The first is one made on a total budget of £100 by a family hardware store in Wales – and the £100 was purely the cost of copyright for the music. Made to encourage people to support local small businesses it features the owner’s 2year old son helping in the shop and then growing up to inherit it.
- The second one I like is also small budget even though it comes from a major supermarket. Staff at their store in Wakefield filmed themselves getting donations from around the store and then using that donated food in their volunteering at a local food kitchen for the homeless.
- The third one I like is made by a charity. Featuring Corky a toy dog enjoying the celebrations, it has all the feel-good factors until the celebrations are over and the now breathing dog is abandoned to the bin along with the decorations it had played with the previous day. And the ad ends with a phrase coined a number of years ago “a dog is for life not just for Christmas”.
Although it doesn’t actually have to be stressful, lots of people moan about the stress of Christmas. Another feeling often expressed about Christmas is wouldn’t it be good if the positive feelings around Christmas lasted? Well, they can – if we have the will to make them last. Just as dogs are for life not just for Christmas, so the same is true for kindness, love, generosity, and all the positive aspects of Christmas shown in all the different Christmas adverts. As I heard another minister say recently:
Jesus whose birth we celebrate is the gift that keeps on giving all year.
Roy Wood from Wizzard sang:
I wish it could be Christmas every day
Not many of us want the shmalzy aspects of Christmas to last all year, but it is in our power, yours and mine, to make the positives last. So will you do so in the coming year?
