The Gospel according to John Lewis: How Christmas ads reveal our culture’s longing for meaning

What’s your favourite Christmas tradition? Trudging down to the local parish church on a crisp winter’s night to belt out carols, perhaps? Decorating the tree listening to Slade and quaffing mince pies? Tying up food packages to make sure a local family is able to enjoy something special at the end of a tough year?

Or if you’re really honest, have you bought into some of the more modern rituals and conventions of the festive season? The calorific coffee shop Christmas drinks; the hard-to-believe early bird sales; or the divisive office Christmas jumper day? Each extract just a little more cash from our wallets, yet we comply willingly, because these things induce a tiny emotional reaction, somewhere between nostalgia and meaning.

When it comes to meaning-making, one new Christmas tradition stands head and shoulders above the rest. Each year it draws us in, makes us feel special and subtly tries to convince us of some new version of the true meaning of Christmas. So, soften your focus, imagine some cool emerging singer-songwriter is performing a soulful slowed-down version of ‘Everybody hurts’, and let’s talk about the phenomenon of big-brand Christmas adverts.

Beginnings

It all started with Shadow. In 2007, department store John Lewis instructed their ad agency Low London to move away from product-based TV adverts and create something which more broadly projected a warm, relatable aesthetic for their brand at Christmas. Although various products featured in the background – a computer, a desk lamp, a classy satchel – they were actually being assembled and backlit to create a shadow projection in the foreground. That simple, ambiguous image of a woman and an animal looking up at (or possibly following) a Christmas star, marked a profound shift of focus: from the desirability of the gifts themselves to the meaning behind giving them.

The ads point to a need for meaning but can’t quite take us on the journey to find it

The advert drew praise and industry awards, but didn’t quite kickstart the trend we now observe at the end of each year. For the next few years, the brand and their creative agencies began to shape what has since become an annual national talking point. The following year’s offering introduced one of the most enduring elements of the modern Christmas ad: the trademark musical style. In this case, The Beatles’ upbeat pop ditty ‘From me to you’ was reimagined as a tender, haunting ballad. In years to come, these Christmas covers would feature well-known artists such as Lily Allen and Paloma Faith but, in 2008, the firm asked their own staff to provide the vocals.

Over the next few years, the John Lewis Christmas ad became a quiet phenomenon, and while the cover versions got plinkier and plonkier (notably Ellie Goulding’s 2010 rendition of Elton John’s ‘Your song’), it was in 2011 that the format was perfected – and then quickly emulated by competitors. That year’s ad, entitled The Long Wait, marked a shift towards a much more narrative form; a miniature short story about a small boy waiting for 25 December not because – as we’re led to predict – he’s excited about opening presents but giving one. It was heartfelt, perhaps even a bit tear-inducing, and it posed the eternal question: What’s the true meaning of Christmas?

This, in one way or another, is the question that lies behind every decent successor to that first Christmas ad. And of course, it’s the question that the Church has been trying to answer for almost 2,000 years. Before we get too excited, however, it’s probably important to note that John Lewis and John’s Gospel come to vastly different conclusions about the answer.

When Joe met Keira

Unless you’ve made a decision to expunge all attempts at marketing from your life, you’ll be fully aware of Christmas 2025’s hottest – and most unlikely – couple. When Joe Wilkinson, breakout star of The Celebrity Traitors, and proud owner of a full Mr Twit beard, met movie star Keira Knightley over the Waitrose cheese counter, it was the beginning of a festive love story for the ages. Or at least, that was the premise of the high-end supermarket’s most recent Christmas ad. Though short versions of the ensuing story were screened regularly on TV, they drove viewers to the longer, four-minute version online; a tiny, sub-Richard Curtis rom-com complete with misunderstanding, plot twist and romantic denouement. 

The ad, with only a nominal sense of actual product placement, supercharged the trend that has been bubbling over the last two decades. With its lavish budget, stirring soundtrack and mini-morality tale plot, it hit all the beats of the modern Christmas ad and took them even further. It wasn’t trying to sell us slightly overpriced food as much as an idea: that Christmas is a moment to look beyond the packaging and recognise the priceless gift right in front of us. Sounds like a line straight out of a gospel sermon, doesn’t it?

Christmas ads represent a cultural longing for goodness, beauty and redemption

There’s a strong moral thread at the heart of almost all the great Christmas ads. The other 2025 standout, from John Lewis once again, features a middle-aged father whose enjoyment of a Christmas gift both rekindles some teenage nostalgia and reveals his own self-interested character. Yet there’s a twist as the moment sparks a realisation: in his introspection he’s neglected his relationship with his own teenage son. Having had his damascene moment, he quickly moves to resolve the issue with a tear-jerking hug. Inside two minutes, we’ve not only observed the deep complexities of close familial relationships but been forced to reflect on our own; it’s a staggeringly effective and emotive micro-movie which asks: What kind of people do we want to be? How might we need to change in order to become them?

It seems that Christmas, with all its associations of family, nostalgia, fresh starts and a hard-to-define sense of meaning, provides the perfect context for this kind of conversation. As we take stock at the end of a long year, and look ahead with cautious hope to the next, we’re perhaps more willing than usual to interrogate our values and see how we’re measuring up to them. Am I superficial, like Joe Wilkinson’s friends? Am I self-centred, like the John Lewis dad? Is there more to life than just stuff?

This final question is, of course, where the big brands trip up on irony. Waitrose wants to simultaneously promote the virtues of looking beyond aesthetics and the perfectly aesthetic Christmas. John Lewis wants to sell us stuff to meet our own whims and warn us about the dangers of doing so. The ads point to a need for meaning but can’t quite take us on the journey to find it.

Meaning-making

Perhaps this is one reason our churches fill up at Christmas. While the ads scratch a collective itch for meaning, they can’t quite salve the discomfort. Short form content like this gives us fragments of both the problem (selfishness, materialism, conflict) and the solutions (sacrifice, family values, love). Yet all they can do is point towards the answer, while hoping that we’ll pick their store for our big Christmas shop that year. 

That said, they can’t seem to avoid hinting at Christian themes along the way. Yes, Christmas is a Christian festival, but we’re not talking about stables, donkeys and virgin births here. Rather, Christmas ads often seem to stumble into theological ideas, from the centrality of community around the dining table, to the human compulsion towards forgiveness and redemption.

Hospitality and making space for the outsider is also a common theme. So are vulnerability and reconciliation. Hope, love and joy are centred. All the components, just in need of a compelling thread to pull it together. It’s as if the true meaning of Christmas has been deconstructed and laid out like a jigsaw puzzle, ready for someone to assemble it. 

When EastEnders’ Dirty Den served his wife, Angie, divorce papers on Christmas Day 1986, the whole nation was jump-started into talking about sin and morality. Now, Christmas TV is a much-diminished cultural force and the big talking points are created between the shows, or in online ads served between YouTube clips. And the point is that while the medium has changed, the desire to talk about big questions at Christmas hasn’t diminished at all. Joe and Keira are just the new Den and Angie. 

Joining the conversation

Yes, these are adverts, painfully expensive chunks of marketing created to make us spend money with big brands all year round. At the same time, they represent something more: a broadly felt cultural longing for goodness, beauty and redemption that can’t be shaken off. When the nation gathers around its screens (large and small) to watch miniature parables of selflessness, reconciliation and love, then surely an opportunity for the Church is created.

Many people are already halfway into a conversation that Christians long to have with them. Our friends and neighbours aren’t indifferent to the hope that life might have more meaning, and they’ll happily cry over that idea in a 90-second montage set to a beautifully reworked Oasis cover. What they’re missing is not desire, but direction. They sense the ache for meaning. They recognise the brokenness. They believe in the possibility of restoration. What they lack is a story big enough to hold all of that together without collapsing into sentimentality or the band-aid of materialism.

This is where Christianity has something better to offer. We don’t have to invent a narrative of sacrificial love or cobble together a moral message with the help of a top London ad agency. We point instead to a God who doesn’t simply inspire warm feelings but steps into human history in the vulnerability of a child. To a saviour who doesn’t just hint at redemption but accomplishes it. To a story that doesn’t need a stunt soundtrack or a celebrity cameo to feel meaningful, because it’s true.

Christmas ads teach us to look again at our own storytelling. The Church has the richest, most hopeful story imaginable, yet we often tell it like an instruction manual rather than a love song. The best adverts invite us to feel before we think; to inhabit the story rather than analyse it. Might we learn to communicate the gospel with similar imagination – not manipulative, not sentimental, but beautifully human? If these ads hold up a mirror to the longings of the nation, could we reflect back the solution that Jesus offers with the same kind of creativity and emotional intelligence?

If a supermarket can nudge the nation towards wonder with a four-minute Christmas rom-com, how much more might the Church – with humility, creativity and compassion – help people see the deeper, truer story behind every longing these adverts so artfully awaken?