You know the festive season is really revving up when Mariah Carey posts her annual holiday message and the Christmas ads starts dropping.
British department store John Lewis has long been the king of heartwarming festive commercials, and this year's instalment — which combines live-action with CGI, animation, and claymation — looks set to tread familiar ground.
The theme of the ad is simple enough, starting with a little girl using her heart-shaped umbrella to get a boy's football down from a tree, then moving through a chain-letter of good deeds as each character does something nice for the next.
The ad might be too sugary-sweet for some, but the message — "give a little love" — seems like a fitting antidote to the hellscape that has been 2020. Even better, the ad is part of a campaign this year to raise money for two charities, Home-Start and FareShare, which aim to help struggling families and feed vulnerable people (something that has been spotlighted recently thanks to footballer Marcus Rashford's ongoing campaign against child food poverty).
