For twenty years now, the John Lewis holiday advertisement has served as an unofficial starting gun for the British Christmas season, a role the department store chain has embraced with the sort of earnest commitment that Americans might associate with the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, if the parade were two minutes long and designed to make you cry.
This year's installment, the twentieth in the series, features Dame Kristin Scott Thomas as a grandmother — though not, the retailer would have you understand, an ordinary one. She is joined by a wooden dog named Pickles, who is voiced by the British television personality Paul Whitehouse. (One imagines the casting sessions were brief.)
The campaign, created by Saatchi & Saatchi, which has handled the John Lewis account since 2022, carries the theme "Don't Give Up on Giving." The message, according to the retailer, is meant to address the anxiety that accompanies the search for a perfect gift — a condition that, if one were feeling uncharitable, might be described as the precise anxiety that department stores have spent a century cultivating.
The soundtrack is a cover of the Rolling Stones' 1969 song "You Can't Always Get What You Want," performed by the indie artist Sam Fender. The song selection continues a John Lewis tradition of reinterpreting familiar tracks in a minor key, a practice that has by now become its own small genre.
Dame Kristin, who is perhaps best known to American audiences for her role in "Four Weddings and a Funeral," brings to the proceedings the sort of composed warmth that the campaign requires — grandmotherly, yes, but with cheekbones.
The advertisement is the latest entry in what John Lewis calls its "Give Your Gift" platform, now in its third year. Whether British viewers will find it as moving as its predecessors remains, as always, a matter for social media to adjudicate within hours of the launch.
Original story published in adweek.com: "Kristin Scott Thomas Is No Ordinary Grandma in John Lewis’ Holiday Campaign"