Existential dread of Christmas ads (En)

Ok, the season of Christmas commercials is upon us, and we’ll be exposed to them every other minute for the next two months pretty much everywhere, and it already doesn’t look good (or wholesome, if you want to use the lingo of a random pr-team).

*With the voice of Charlotte Tilbury* M&S, darling, what is wrong with you? Your food Christmas ad is cute, but the main one is messy, despite your effort to make it look more relatable to your customers. No, you don’t need to burn a pile of Christmas cards in order to feel great about yourself and to free yourself from any “ghastly” family pressure (by the way, why should you do that in the first place? if you don’t want to send the bloody cards, just don’t: there is no card police out there—at least, not to my knowledge)—thanks to social media we all are, involuntarily or not, involved in the Main Character Syndrome and navel-gazing for the last twenty or so years; I guess, it will be nice to give this up at least once per year, no?

Oh, and the whole thing with burning lots of paper: are you guys sure that it’s good for your sacred sustainability? After all, it was your chain that made this clever decision to toss the plastic (not for your lil packs of fruit and veg, however) and to replace durable bags with crappy paper ones for the sake of saving the planet™. Try to be more consistent with your slogans next time.

...Why do I overthink this silliness, you may ask? Well, see, a commercial buzz is inevitable, and instead of making it less annoying, our market overlords have gone full rogue and sent quite mixed signals to us, hoi polloi: “be aware, protect your environment” on the one hand and “don’t give a flying fuck about your so-called family and friends” on the other. Weirdly enough, it reminds me of the “effective altruism” motto delivered to us by a bunch of pseudo-nerds from the FTX: collect as much profit as you can from the oblivious idiots, and to make the actual process more efficient, layer it with catchy and fashionable keywords. You’ll be fine, and may the rest of the world bugger off.

But of course you do you, boo. As for myself, I love me some simple festive joys, including silly Christmas cards, no matter how boring and formal they look: as all malicious folks, I am rather sentimental.