There can’t be anyone skirting closer to burnout, more deserving of our sympathy and complicated respect, than the people who conceive Christmas ads. The goal is straightforward: make people feel good about Christmas so that they spend more than they otherwise might. Amp up the love and affection of the season; play down the labour (emotional and otherwise); make everyone feel a bit hungrier and thirstier – job done.

This must be at least the fifth year, though, that the world looks so perilous, so fraught and vexed, so sad and chaotic, that what’s an honest supermarket to do? The retailers weathered the first Covid Christmas, when demand for nut multipacks and pigs in blankets was poignantly low; then they weathered Christmas 2021, when restrictions came back so unexpectedly that it wasn’t unusual for a household to have 14 times as much turkey as they could possibly eat.

Wham, it was the end of 2022, and they were trying to sell excess and indulgence and worry-about-the-bills-tomorrow in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis. From 2023 to the present day, it has felt a bit gross to talk about the joy of family togetherness when so much of the world is wartorn. And I have to say,

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