Here it is, Merry Christmas, everybody’s having fun. Well, it isn’t, and they aren’t, but it might as well be. For this weekend, all the Christmas advertising campaigns launched. “Holidays are coming”, chant the perennially joyful Coca-Cola singers in Rainbowland as a giant truck snarls down Main Street, cruelly failing to add “Open brackets, in six weeks’ time, if you’re lucky, close brackets”.
What have we become? What led us to here? What led us to a world in which every single advert ever has to have snow in it, and try and make us cry? What happened? What have we done to deserve this? In Christmasadvertland, it always snows, and families are lovely, and mums do everything, and men are hopeless and buy a turd in a box and have to get helped out, because their rancid brains are full of stupid, and it always snows. Stop the madness. Stop it now.
It’s John Lewis’s fault, of course. We’ve been destined for this ever since grown adults shed salt tears at last year’s sickening glurgefest in which a boy bought his mum and dad the present of a nice lie-in on Christmas morning, set to the horrific choral excoriation of the Smiths’ “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want”.
At least that had something going for it – it upset those fun vacuums who still like Morrissey – but this year’s offering hasn’t even got that bronze lining. No, we’re stuck with another plodding “classic” with the vital organs and even the less pleasant offal ripped out of it, leaving just the squishy inedible connective tissue – “The Power of Love” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood depicting the story of a snowman buying some gloves for his icy inamorata.
I don’t wish to get tediously literal about a mushy bit of sentimental old flannel which is designed to make you spend money in an expensive shop. But let me say this: How did the snowman pay for his purchase? Did he tap out his pin on a keypad using a spindly twig finger? If he did, surely he would have realised that, with fingers made out of twigs, gloves were probably the worst possible present of all to buy his for his snowy ladylove.
It’s a despicable slushpuppie of an advertisement, appealing at first but causing horrifying brainfreeze immediately afterwards. Why is the snowlady so passive? Why is it only the snowman who is doing the purchasing of Christmassy things? Why are snowpeople in love with each other, despite lacking sexual characteristics of any kind? It’s not that it’s heteronormative that annoys me; it’s the sheer bloody predictability of it all.
Enough. It’s not just John Lewis peddling levels of sticky-sweet sentimentality that should come with a health warning for diabetic viewers. They’re all at it. Asda, who you can usually rely on just to tell you that their things are cheap and, hey, why not come down and buy some, have attempted to ace the field with their own advent offering.
It’s even worse. In Asda’s advert we’re told that mums are responsible for everything Christmassy. Hooray, you might say, what a warm and welcome departure from the patriarchal figure of Der Julemanden or Papa Noel popping down chimneys of an Xmas Eve, but you’d be wrong: this isn’t the mother as empowered twenty-first-century totem, but a horrible message that everyone should hate.
Mums should hate it, because supposedly they have to do every bloody thing forever, and get no help, and that’s just the way it is; and everyone who isn’t a mum, or who doesn’t have one should hate it, because apparently they’re missing out on the sine qua non of Christmastime. Woe betide you if your dad’s doing the Christmas dinner, because it’s bound to be shit. That’s the message.
Morrisons’ meagre dribble of a commercial is the same. SuperMum struggles by and does everything, because she “wouldn’t have it any other way”. Really? Well, you see, we have let this happen. We didn’t complain about the execrable “proud sponsors of mums” garbage during the Olympics; we didn’t complain about John Lewis’s nailgun to the tearducts last festive season, so we’re stuck with this. Forever.
Then you have the Very advert: stupid braindead MAN has bought something RUBBISH because he’s a MAN and only the clever WOMAN can do something about it. Regular readers will know I’m no fan of the whiny perinea who mewl about “misandry”, but come off it: this kind of thing should have gone out with the Ark, shouldn’t it? Is this really only as far as we’ve come in all these years?
Please. For me. For all of us who quite like Christmas, but start to see the joy of being a Jehovah’s Witness with every passing commercial break, can we just have a bit less snow? A bit less sexism? A bit less lachrymosity, and a bit more fun? Is that too much to ask, Santa? Please, please, please, let me get what I want…
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