Expressing Their Values In A Heartwarming Way
Lifted from the comments,
That would be the advert currently trending for all the wrong reasons, and regarding which viewers’ feedback has now been disabled.
Hideous advert
Appeasement and entitlement
NOT what CHRISTMAS should be about; and definitely isn’t in my book.
Oh @JohnLewisRetail you’ve completely missed the point! https://t.co/O0OBNfaPiV— Manda moo (@Warrioramira01) November 4, 2026
Says commenter Min,
Yes, they’ve often been rather sweet with an agreeable, universal sentiment. Missing friends, shyness, loneliness, not wanting to leave people out, etc. Hibernating bears. Machine-tooled emotional manipulation. Which is how a department-store Christmas ad should be.
This year, however, they’ve assumed we’ll be enchanted by rude, selfish, misbehaving children whose affection has to be bought with great effort and at great expense, in desperation. And the decision to make those children brown – because apparently you can’t have an advert without the statistically unlikely interracial couple – adds a dynamic that I somehow doubt was intended.
Commenter [+] quips,
What’s remarkable is that the project must have involved any number of highly-paid, supposedly clued-up experts, masters of nuance, and endless meetings, over months… and no bugger spotted how readily the ad lends itself to much less festive interpretations.
I watched it again this morning and am still processing just how weirdly misjudged it is.
For instance, that heartwarming moment when the scowling, diverse grandchildren shake their Christmas cards in annoyance, having found no money in them. Behaviour enabled, one assumes, by the ineffectual, unapologetic parents, who allow their offspring to wreck other people’s homes and to jump up and down on other people’s furniture.
And remember, we’re supposed to like these unparented brats, enough to care about pleasing them. And we’re supposed to identify with the grandma who wants these brats to love her, if only for a few minutes, before they presumably resume their scowling, ungrateful ways.
Feel that Christmas spirit, people.
It does rather suggest a gulf between, on the one hand, progressively-inclined John Lewis management and progressively-inclined London ad executives who think that sneaking trans flags into Christmas adverts watched by children is terribly clever – and on the other hand, actual John Lewis customers and the general public.
We’ve been here before, of course. When customers were expected to find charming the thought of their homes being trashed by a selfish, vamping, cross-dressing child.
And then there was the attempt to endear customers by announcing, very proudly, that they employ middle-aged transvestites with whipping fetishes because doing so results in “a better connection to our customers.” Thanks to these “identities we share.”
As I said at the time,
Perhaps well-off ladies in search of posh frocks and upscale furnishings will be dazzled and enchanted by the thought of sad, cross-dressing men in thigh-high boots who like to share photos of themselves smeared with unspecified white substances.
It’s hilariously insane. But in fairness, very now.
Will try to keep this short but…
So my wife, who for years now has been rather frustrated with my spending so much time engaged online with people, both left and right, including somewhat here…my wife whom I have a $100 bet that Hillary will never be POTUS…my wife who was actually the one who indicated to me that Trump was a serious candidate in the 2016 primaries…she began engaging on Facebook in one of the local forums. One that mixed local info and local politics, which often spread to national politics.
She has been quite nervous about this election, especially as the Iran thing dragged on. She started posting on that forum, like several times a day whenever she saw a good meme, etc. The thing is, she’s been very reluctant to get her own FB account so I let her (initially, occasionally) post on mine so long as she preceded it with “Diane posting…” For personal stuff I didn’t care. I didn’t realize how much she was posting until I started getting a large number of notifications. I didn’t really care as I agreed with 95% of it. She’s not the best at verifying stuff so that 5% were things I had to point out, “You know, I pay for grok…” No big deal. But what became a big deal…
Her posts were well received if you looked at like/heart/etc. reactions but the comments…well…About a month ago here I alluded to a certain, somewhat moderate death threat (“can’t wait to see you get Kirked” or something like that). That comment was in response to some of my responses to comments on her post. We weren’t planning it this way but she would mostly do the posts and I would mostly, and to save time with grok help sometimes, handle the comments. After a while, the violent language and very…dumb personal insults were heading her way as well.
At first it was just us responding to their comments but I was encouraged not just by the overwhelmingly positive like/heart/wtf reactions but also that as the weeks went on, more and more people started to speak up. The positive like/whatever reactions generally ran in the 80-90% range while the comments, a bit harder to estimate, while initially were about 90/10 against her posts, by this week were close to the 50/50 range. Just a thought on how speaking up in these unsafe spaces can encourage others to do so.
Also…just in case I disappear from here for a few weeks, do a check on North Georgia political violence stories. She and I have become somewhat of a thing that I have seen bleed over to at least one other local group. She, and I, have gotten into their heads such that they would make issue of the “Diane posting…” thing, coming up with theories that I was hiding behind that name or that she wasn’t a real person. They even made a somewhat detailed meme of her…included below. Don’t ask me who Bill is but it does kinda align with my wtp pseudonym. I still don’t carry regularly but judging from some of the threats I may need to start.