Ask someone to name an old Christmas advert and the answer may arrive as a tune, a catchphrase or a single picture. A boy standing on a telephone directory. A red lorry covered in lights. A snowman whose interest in a soft drink is rather less innocent than his smile.
Those memories make a useful alternative to a history built entirely around the modern Christmas advert launch. Before waiting for a new emotional story became part of the season, older campaigns were already finding their way into people's personal Christmas scrapbooks.
John Lewis belongs in that history. It does not mark its beginning. Look further back and you find several different ideas of festive advertising: the recognisable family, the quick joke, the glamorous escape and the welcome return of something familiar.
A short timeline, with room for uncertainty
These are selected landmarks, rather than a claim to cover every important campaign. Our main archive looks at the forty completed Christmas seasons from 1986 to 2025; OXO is included here as an earlier precursor.
| Advert | Date | What the date means |
|---|---|---|
| OXO: My Christmas OXO | 1984 in the brand's account | Premier Foods identified the original this way when announcing its 2014 tribute repeat |
| Quality Street: Carol | 1989 in Yorkshire Film Archive | HAT gives the broader range 1989–1990 |
| Quality Street: Lollipop | 1992 | Yorkshire Film Archive's catalogue year for a separate 30-second film |
| Yellow Pages: Mistletoe | 1992 | Original campaign, later revived by Yell |
| Coca-Cola: Holidays Are Coming | 1995 | Beginning of the UK television tradition, corroborated by its 2015 twentieth-anniversary announcement |
| M&S: From Your M&S with Love | 2006 | The Shirley Bassey, Bond-style Christmas film |
| IRN-BRU: Snowman | 2006 | Original campaign, distinct from the 2018 sequel |
| Boots: Here Come the Girls | 2007 | Christmas party campaign, distinct from 2008's Secret Santa advert |
Old adverts are easy to encounter in new packaging. An upload date can belong to a much later copy; an award can follow the original broadcast. Remembering the right scene matters more than forcing every surviving version into a neat year.
OXO: the family you already knew
Lynda Bellingham's Christmas OXO advert offers a different sort of nostalgia from a lavish fantasy. Its centre is a familiar domestic figure, someone associated with the business of feeding a family.
There is unusually tangible evidence of the affection attached to this campaign. In 2014, after Bellingham's death, ITV reported that Premier Foods would bring back the Christmas advert following requests from fans. The company identified it as the 1984 My Christmas Oxo film.
A repeat in those circumstances becomes more than a piece of archive television. The same commercial can remind a viewer of the actor, the character and the household in which they first encountered both. That is a different feeling from admiring an advert's production budget.
There is a dating wrinkle worth keeping visible: a History of Advertising Trust teaching resource labels My Christmas as 1985. We follow the brand's 1984 identification here, while leaving that discrepancy open. The 2014 tribute is a separate event in the advert's history, not its original release.
Yellow Pages: one joke, perfectly sized
The premise of Mistletoe needs almost no explaining. A boy wants to kiss a taller girl. The Yellow Pages provides the extra height.
Marketing Week's account of Yell's 2023 revival dates the original to 1992. The later campaign took the old film into paid social and streaming, giving a familiar television joke another outing.
The pleasure is in how little machinery the story needs. There is a problem, a useful object and a solution. The directory is both the thing being advertised and the punchline.
For a younger viewer, the bulky book may itself require an explanation. For someone who remembers one beside the telephone, it can bring back a whole corner of a house. That gives the advert two lives: it still works as a visual joke, while the object inside it has become a piece of social history.
Watch Yell's own upload of Mistletoe.
Quality Street: be specific about the memory
“Remember the Quality Street advert?” can turn out to mean several different things. A brand's music and Christmas association can outlast the details of any one execution.
For a securely identified example, the History of Advertising Trust catalogues Carol as a 40-second commercial dated 1989–1990. It credits Ogilvy & Mather and director David Brown, and lists both Good King Wenceslas and Magic Moments in the music information.
Yorkshire Film Archive also holds Carol, cataloguing the 40-second film as 1989. That gives us a more specific year alongside HAT's broader range. Neither the January date in the archive database nor HAT's 1990 award date should be treated as a confirmed first broadcast.
The songs are another reason to be careful. Knowing a familiar song's title does not prove which singer or recording was used. A nostalgic playlist and an accurate soundtrack guide are related projects, but they are not interchangeable.
There is also a separately identified example: Yorkshire Film Archive holds Quality Street: Lollipop, a 30-second film catalogued as 1992. It is a separate record from Carol. The archive's year helps identify it; the January date in its database should not be treated as a confirmed first broadcast.
Coca-Cola: an advert that announces a season
The trucks make a different promise. Where Yellow Pages gives us a complete small incident, Holidays Are Coming offers anticipation.
A 2015 Coca-Cola announcement preserved by Torbay Council celebrated twenty years on UK screens. That places the beginning of the tradition in 1995. It does not mean that every truck film subsequently shown was the same original cut.
The visual idea is easy to carry in the memory: something bright and festive is on its way. If the advert became part of your childhood Christmases, its return can feel like another item on the seasonal checklist, alongside the first decorations or the first Christmas film.
That is an interpretation of its appeal, rather than a claim that everybody shares it. Some viewers remember the trucks fondly; others simply remember seeing them. Both responses belong in an honest history of an advert that has been repeated, revised and revisited.
M&S: Christmas with an evening dress code
Not all nostalgic Christmas advertising takes us home. From Your M&S with Love invites us somewhere much more glamorous.
The M&S archive dates its Shirley Bassey film to 2006 and explicitly connects its James Bond style with the cinema release of Casino Royale. Often remembered as the Ice Hotel advert, it represents Christmas as an occasion to dress up.
Put it next to the Yellow Pages kiss and the contrast is delightful. One creates a festive moment out of an ordinary household object; the other makes Christmas feel like an invitation to an extraordinary night out. Nostalgia has room for both the life we recognise and the life we briefly imagined.
IRN-BRU: permission to be mischievous
IRN-BRU's Snowman brings us to 2006 with a joke at the expense of a familiar festive feeling. The boy and snowman take flight, but a can of drink changes the mood of the journey.
Lupus Films' production history distinguishes Robin Shaw's original from the sequel he directed in 2018. The second film continues the boy's pursuit of his drink; it should not be mistaken for the first advert.
The appeal of the original is partly the collision. A soft, wintry visual world sets up one expectation, while the humour supplies another. It is a useful antidote to the idea that a Christmas classic must be solemn, sweet or designed to make us cry.
Boots: Christmas starts before the party
Boots' 2007 Christmas advert turns the preparations for an office party into the occasion itself. Its energy comes from the getting ready: Christmas as a shared ritual between colleagues, with music doing much of the storytelling.
A contemporary Boots announcement identifies the soundtrack as Ernie K-Doe's Here Come the Girls. It also helps untangle a common memory muddle. The following year's Secret Santa campaign used the Sugababes' Girls, which samples that earlier song. They belong to the same brand's festive history, but are different adverts and different recordings.
This is another strand worth keeping beside the tearjerkers and snowy fantasies. An office party can supply its own anticipation, performance and comedy, without anyone having to travel to the North Pole.
What changed with the modern Christmas film?
Compare these older examples with John Lewis's The Long Wait (2011). Its final reveal asks us to reconsider the boy's impatience. Yellow Pages lets us enjoy a single visual solution; John Lewis makes us revise our reading of a character. Both are economical ways of telling a story, with very different payoffs.
That comparison is more useful than treating 2011 as the moment Christmas advertising began. The older campaigns already contain humour, atmosphere, familiar characters and music. The later film rearranges those ingredients around a particular emotional surprise.
Make your own old advert break
These campaigns make a more interesting viewing session together than a competition to choose a single winner. Watch a quick product joke, a piece of glamour and a cheeky animation, then ask which one you remember most clearly.
The answer may have as much to do with where you were when you saw it as with what is on screen. Which room was the television in? Who else was watching? Did you recognise the advert before the name of the brand appeared?
Start with our Christmas adverts collection, and follow the official or archive viewing links above for the older examples. The best discovery may be that a film you remember as a whole Christmas event lasts less time than it takes to put the kettle on.
