Reacting to HILARIOUS UK Christmas Adverts
I don’t watch live television any more, so regular adverts pass me by, never mind the Christmas ones. Sitting down with the British Christmas adverts of 2024 meant I could actually see what everyone was making. I went in with a fairly high bar, because I’ve always associated the UK with good Christmas ads.
My favourites turned out to be the ones that made me laugh. Give me a missing pudding or a cheeky carrot over a Christmas grief story. That’s my taste, and this year’s supermarket adverts gave me very different versions of what Christmas was supposed to look like.
Cute is fine, but nostalgia is personal
Sainsbury’s started with the BFG helping make a big Christmas feast. The food looked good, the animation was fun, and I could follow the story. I thought it was cute and heartwarming without being something I had to work hard to understand.
I didn’t have a nostalgic connection to the BFG, though. He wasn’t really part of my own childhood. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t big in Canada, just that I wasn’t personally into it. I still liked the advert, and its fairly short length helped. It got to the point.
Tesco found the sad bit
Tesco took a different route, with a Christmas story tied to the loss of a loved one. I initially thought the missing person was the mother, then realised it was Grandma. Either way, grief at Christmas is something I know about, and the advert really wanted to make me cry.
I could see that it was a good advert with a good message, but I hate the sad ones. It was still heartwarming, yet very firmly in the sad category. Christmas grief is a real situation, and putting it into an advert doesn’t stop it hitting a sore spot for me.
An earlier part of the advert, with a grocery delivery, also reminded me of a much less polished delivery at our flat. Some mince pies my partner wanted had escaped their ripped packaging and were rolling around in an Asda delivery bin. The driver asked whether we wanted them. We didn’t. I already think mince pies are vile, so they weren’t for me in the first place.
A pudding mystery won me over
Waitrose’s Sweet Suspicion went for a Christmas mystery. A dessert disappears, and the gathering turns into a crime scene, with questions and suspicion aimed at the people who could have taken it. Christmas is apparently at stake. It’s a pudding, but everyone is treating it very seriously.
That was my favourite so far. It was silly, funny and interesting, and I wanted to know who did it. I also loved Matthew Macfadyen, which may have had something to do with my ranking. I can’t pretend that was completely impartial.
By the end of my reactions, Waitrose was still my number one. I went back to look for part two and couldn’t find it at that point, which left me asking them to just tell us who had done it. I was still thinking about a supermarket pudding. That’s a fairly successful advert.
Two very different kinds of silly
Asda’s Christmas gnomes were my least favourite so far. The little figures coming to life felt a bit terrifying to me, like Christmas Chucky, and the stream of gnome puns didn’t improve things. We’d had cute from Sainsbury’s, sadness from Tesco and a mystery from Waitrose. Asda’s version of fun was going straight to the bottom of my Christmas barrel.
Aldi’s Kevin the Carrot worked much better for me. The story gives him an impossible mission to recover the stolen Christmas spirit, with vegetable spies, a vault and some very cheeky jokes. The false bottom and booby trap really got me. Apparently I’m twelve years old.
I didn’t initially understand that the thing being freed was the Christmas spirit, but once I caught up, I thought it was very funny. Kevin was my number two, behind Waitrose. Silly clearly wasn’t the problem. I just liked this kind of silliness more than the gnomes.
Sometimes it is simply an advert
Argos left me with a fairly plain verdict. It was fine, and it got the message across. An advert doesn’t have to be crazy or especially interesting. But some of these British shops seem to compete to make something bigger, cleverer and more talked about, until the adverts become things people choose to watch.
It is a little insane to sit at my desk watching adverts for fun. Still, when they’re creative enough to leave me laughing at a carrot or waiting for the answer to a missing-pudding mystery, I understand why I do it. Waitrose stayed first, Kevin stayed second, and I’d had quite enough of the sad ones.
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