The Christmas television advertisement campaigns have become huge business in recent years as our biggest retailers fight to get the best advertisment for a particular year. One of my favourites was from one of our major supermarkets a few years ago, who simulated the famous scene from WW1 in the trenches, when for a few minutes on Christmas Day the warring sides stopped firing at one another and they played football. That particular advert was a thing of beauty for me and it will be etched in my memory for a long time to come, it was made all the more special for me because I was told that it had been filmed about a mile and half from where we live. The moral of the advert was about sharing, love, peace and all the themes I associate with Christmas
Christmas adverts this year appear to have focussed on the premis of “Christmas last year was cancelled, so let’s make this one special” which may well be true for some people, but not for all of us. As far as I am concerned we had a great Christmas last year, sure, it was very different to what we had experienced in previous years and it felt very strange not having all the familiar milestones along the way. It was horrible exchanging Christmas presents with our daughter half way between here and Norwich and we would love to have seen our grandson open his Christmas presents on Christmas Day, but was Christmas cancelled? No! definitely not, with true British grit, we made the most of it, I am very thankful for the clever people who invented Zoom, meaning that we were at least able to see members of our family.
What worries me about this year’s advertising campaign is the way retailers unashamedly try to convince consumers that the only way to make up for everything we missed out on last year, is to spend lots of money this year, so that we can buy lavish presents, invest in new furniture, elctronics, telephones and labour saving devices so that we can relax and enjoy ourselves. The suggestion is that we should buy enough food to keep us nourished throughout the whole of 2022 and the message is one of spend, spend, spend, which greatly concerns me at a time when increasing numbers of families are using food banks and people are still recovering from the fallout of the Pandemic and I am concerned that people will regret overspending as the new year gets under way.
As we journey through Advent 2021 the gloom mongers are talking about the Omicron variant and there are rumours that Christmas might once again be under threat, my question is this, “Can Christmas really be cancelled?” I would suggest that the answer to that is “no!” I believe that the true message of Christmas is that God loved the world so much, that he sent his son to dwell among us and what that means to me is that the true message of Christmas has very little to do with over indulgence. The advertisers in 2021 are clearly trying to make a fast buck on the back of peoples’ perceived misery at a point when many of us are feeling vulnerable. The true message of Christmas should always be centred on Love, Peace and Hope, let these be a hallmark of Christmas 2021.
A prayer for this week: Find a few moments to stop, be quiet and think for a moment or two.
As Christmas gets ever closer, we pray for the people of the world, remembering particularly those who find this Christmas difficult, those who have lost somebody they love, those who feel lonely, those who are struggling with the whole pandemic experience. May Christmas 2021 be a time of joy, peace and love.