Christmas Ads

 

I don’t mind pre-Christmas ads in general, and actually I love the one in the picture above.   I know we need toy ads from about September to help the little people decide what they want from Santy.

And I suppose I don’t really mind the supermarket and department store ads shouting at us from October about ordering turkeys, sure what else would they be doing?

Although I’m not impressed by the Marks and Spencer ad this year, it’s like a short film based on Alice in Wonderland.  It’s very annoying.  Particularly when that amazing looking model Rosie something or other finds herself in her bra and knickers twice during the ad. That’s extremely annoying.  Or at least it is for me.  His Nibs might quite like it, I'm afraid to ask.

Generally speaking, it’s the ads that have nothing to do with the festive season, but where they just throw in the word “Christmas” to create a panic, that annoy me most.

There’s one for a strange product that seems to be a sort of brush that you put on the shower floor.  Then when you’re having your shower you just put your feet in and brush them.  Apparently there’s a pumice stone on it too, so you can remove the dead skin on your feet as you go.

This is not a Christmas product.  Yet the ad finishes with a shouted “Get perfect feet for Christmas”.
I suppose for the ladies who will be celebrating the festive season in black sequinned dresses and four inch strappy shoes, getting perfect feet for Christmas is a priority.
But I think those women might have lovely feet anyway.

For those of us whose only essential outfit for Christmas is new flannelette pyjamas with Santy or Rudolph on them, getting perfect feet for the season is so far down the list of priorities as to be a pointless dream.
Isn’t it enough that we all spend flip flop season getting pedicures and using lotions and potions to have the feet of a child, without having to re-start that whole caper in November?
If we have to have nice feet as well as everything else, I’m not doing Christmas this year.

There’s another ad that yelps at us all to order a new sofa or bed now, and take delivery of it in time for Christmas.

Christmas is one day.  A day when, in my experience, the morning is spent with every surface covered in scraps of wrapping paper.  In the afternoon everyone is asleep, and in the evening most people are drunk. 

I’m not getting new fecking furniture.  It’s hard enough to buy the presents and the food and the drink and everything else without having to buy new furniture as well.  
And we all know that if we need new furniture, it’ll all be reduced to half price in January anyway. They can feck off.

Although there’s one furniture store currently running a very irritating ad, promising to give the January sale price on any sofa bought now.  What’s the point in having a January sale if everything is reduced in December?

Now we’ve not only bypassed the usual six weeks, and bounced directly from Halloween to Christmas, this crowd have galloped past the whole season, and launched us straight to the January sales.

I think it's Aldi who are suggesting lobster for dinner.  How do you even serve lobster?  Do you give it to your family with its shell still on, effectively turning Christmas dinner into a talent show, where etiquette and agility are awarded points at the table? 

I wouldn’t have a clue how to tackle a fully shelled lobster.

Apparently you buy it cooked.  So do you serve it cold?  I can’t imagine a cold dinner at Christmas.  It’s all too much to think about, really.  Again, they can feck off.  Poultry will be fine.

Sainsbury’s asked their customers to record their special Christmas moments last year, so that they could use them in their ads this year. 

The one with the kids recording a Christmas message for their Dad in Afghanistan when he arrives in the door to surprise them is a complete tear jerker.  Maybe it’s only my tears it jerks, but I very much doubt it.  I’m not that hormonal.

But the one with the family tramping through the forest dragging their Christmas tree behind them just makes me feel inferior.  We do well in our house to drag the artificial one out of the attic in time for the Big Day. 

Can you imagine His Nibs and I going to a forest to chop down a tree, dragging it back to the car park, getting it into or onto the car, bringing it home and decorating it?

We have rows in the supermarket, just buying our groceries.  There’d be war. We’d have split up by Christmas.
That’s not a  normal Christmas family moment.  At least, I don’t think it is.  Surely it’s more average for the man of the house to be sent out to get the tree, since the lady of the house has to do everything else?  He arrives back with a tree that’s either too big, too small, too narrow or too bushy, and she gives out about that for what seems like hours.  Then the rest of the day is wasted with him trying to stand the tree up in its bucket, cursing and swearing and insisting the whole Christmas business is a waste of time anyway?

There’s no videoing each other happily dragging a large tree through a forest, laughing and teasing.  In reality they’d all be eating the faces off each other.

It also annoys me that ads for completely random things now end with “makes an ideal gift for Christmas”. 
This evening I saw one for a flexi torch.  It’s a torch that the ad suggests you might like to carry in your pocket, car or handbag.  It’s a normal torch, but has a flexible handle almost two feet long.  The handle, the ad proudly states, is bendy, and has a strong magnet in the light up bit.  Very much like a torch that Inspector Gadget might carry.

The example they give of where this torch could be very handy is when you drop your keys down a grate.  You just whip out this torch, stretch it out, light it up and can see clearly into the grate. The keys will stick to the magnet, and are easily retrieved.
I’m not the most imaginative of souls, but I can’t think of another single time when a stretchy magnetic torch would come in useful.

And the ad ends with the suggestion that it would make an ideal Christmas present.  Not for me, I may as well tell you.  If someone handed me this piece of tat and tried to pass it off as a Christmas present, I would spend the day wearing my very, very sulky face.

I must warn His Nibs.