Are you Team Elf or Team Self?
Childhood magic, festive narcissism and the M&S Christmas ad
This week’s intended post about relationships and connection will now be coming to you next week. For I have just seen the new M&S Christmas advert and it’s got my fingers twitching in despair.
In the advert we see some TV personalities (I don’t recognise them all tbh) dressed up to the nines, choosing to do Christmassy ‘acts of service’ for their loved ones. One of Jackson’s mums off Sex Education is gluing cotton wool onto a snowman. Tan off Queer Eye puts a toilet roll fairy on his otherwise glamourous tree. There’s a cross-generational family loving a game of charades. A glittery lady puts the finishing touches to a gingerbread house with one of those crème brûlée torches. Meanwhile Meat Loaf’s ‘I would do anything for love’ plays in the background. It’s not him singing. They’ve done the John Lewis thing1 and had it re-recorded by a sultry-sounding woman.
Then, in a shocking turn of events, as she blasts out, ‘But I won’t do that’, crème brûlée lady sets fire to some Christmas cards, Tan upends a board game into a fish tank, and charades lady thwacks an Elf on the Shelf across the city with a baseball bat.
What. The. Fuck.
The tagline? This Christmas do only what you love.
No M&S. No, no, no. Because I have four children. And if I did only what I loved they would be making themselves a peanut butter sandwich for Christmas dinner whilst I sat around admiring my new Mulberry handbag and drinking an expensive bottle of red wine.
I jest. I wouldn’t love that really. Because what I love best is the magic!
Children should be grown with love and magic
I’ve written about my life purpose statements before - you can read that article here.
One of the three life purpose statements I aim to live by is:
I provide for my kids a childhood dominated by love, joy and magic, and instil in them a strong sense of self-worth.
The word ‘magic’ is there very intentionally. In my life vision boards (which I will share another time) there are pictures of the tooth fairy and Lapland. Because that is what I want for my children. Childhood is a fleeting and sacred time when magic can be real. I believe if a child can grow with magic inside them, it will stay with them for the rest of their life. It will shape their entire outlook on the world.
Deri wasn’t grown with magic. I hope he won’t mind me sharing that. I’ve been trying to inject it into him over the last 15 years. I’ve had some success, but I don’t think it will ever get into his bones now. He’s missed the window. I didn’t used to understand this, but I had an ‘aha’ moment when our daughter was two. We were prepping her for the dummy fairy to come and take her dummies ‘for a baby who needed them more’. I put a fairy door in her room and got her excited about it. Deri’s parents were visiting and his mum enquired about the tiny door stuck on her bedroom wall. I explained. She looked at me bemused and said, “Oh. That’s strange.” I thought, “Oh. That explains a lot.”
I was grown with magic. My mum’s Christmas mantra was, ‘If you don’t believe, you don’t receive’ and she had us happily believing until…well, I still do really!
The controversial Elf
I know it’s only just November and we don’t want to think about The Elf yet, but blame M&S. Now I need to talk about The Elf.
Just because I believe in *all the magic* doesn’t mean I love all that is necessary to create the magic. To be looking forward to The Elf arriving on 1st December would be borderline masochistic.
For the majority of parents, it is a pain. It’s one more thing to do on a long list of things to do. It requires some semblance of creativity. It requires consistency. Sometimes it requires you to stumble downstairs at 4am when you realise you’ve forgotten to do something with it. And someone on Instagram will always have done it better than you and make you feel a bit crap.
But here’s the rub. It’s not about you. It’s not about whether you love it.
It’s an act of service. For them.
Most people get this. That’s why they keep doing The Elf each year. And hide chocolate eggs from the Easter Bunny. And swap baby teeth under pillows for a shiny coin. And that’s why M&S have missed the mark. Parents might bemoan these things, but only in the way we bemoan the British weather and the instant coffee at soft play. We stick with it anyway because overall, the good outweighs the bad.
The idea that we would become festive narcissists, doing only the things we love regardless of the impact on our children, is as bizarre as it is depressing. If something has to give, don’t let it be the magic2.
What do you think?
Are you Team Elf or Team Self?
Did you like the M&S Christmas ad more than me?
A book to make you smile
Hurrah for Gin
by Katie Kirby3
As I pinched her elf graphic and it makes me smile every year, it seemed apt to include a recommendation for Hurrah for Gin. A nugget of solidarity for parents of babies and pre-schoolers, it would make a great Christmas gift for those newish to ‘the game’.
When I was learning to be a counsellor we were encouraged to always consider our biases and how they might influence our reactions to the people and situations in front of us. With this in mind, I feel it necessary to note that my blood runs John Lewis green. I worked there for a decade and was in the midst of the Buying Board at the start of JL’s heyday of Christmas advertising. I saw some of those ads as story boards, and shed a tear to the finished results in a meeting room before the public had a sniff of them. But I’ve learnt that M&S’s Marketing Director probably did too. I recognised her name in a press release and she was also at JL in those days, in the Marketing team.
Or indeed your sanity. Choose what you let go of wisely.
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