Voices: Anti-Palestine, un-Christian or pro-gay rights? You choose… this is an M&S Christmas ad!

The moment Marks & Spencer unveiled its 2023 Christmas advert, outrage on social media began burning like cinnamon-scented pinecones.

Within a day, the light-hearted commercial – featuring Hannah Waddingham, Tan France and Sophie Ellis-Bextor, each facing a festive dilemma – had stoked an inferno, fed by a bulging Christmas stocking’s-worth of spurious grievances, all of which I’ll come to.

But what first got this pyre going was an outtake in which three paper party hats – coloured red, green and silver – are thrown into an open hearth. Which is obviously a metaphor for the Palestinian flag, and thus inappropriate given the current situation in Gaza.

It’s ludicrous. The fact those are also the colours of the Welsh, Mexican and Italian flags, among several others, seems to have gone over the heads of the outraged Twitterati.

However, the flames of indignation have caught and quickly spread. Other people are up in arms because the message of the advert is “not Christian” – unlike, say, the annual Argos commercial depicting showers of discounted household goods, or the annual mega-bucks John Lewis offering, telling the well-loved Biblical story of a lonely old man spying on a small girl from the moon.

Does the M&S’s Christmas advert include paper party hats on fire – or a Palestinian (or Welsh, or Italian…) flag? (Marks & Spencer/Mother)

Martin Daubney, the former Brexit Party MEP turned professionally outraged GB News organ-grinder, posted his opinion that M&S’s clip is “the worst Xmas ad of the year” – complaining that the Britain represented in this small, charming fiction is not one of all-white straight couples and their children. “No heterosexual couple in sight!“ he thundered, “100% diversity and 0% fun!”

For all the foaming, the M&S advert is not, however, a coded incitement to further violence in the Middle East, a polemic against Christianity, or a woke bat signal triggering the immediate cancellation of heterosexual marriage and child-rearing. Made by the award-winning ad agency Mother, its message is that not all Christmas traditions must be strictly adhered to. Fight the pressure to have a “perfect” Christmas, it says, and create traditions that are meaningful to you.

To scroll the reaction, you might assume it depicts solemn parades of pilgrims advancing towards Mecca, or a woman abandoning her sobbing family as the clock strikes midnight.

Instead, it’s full of the usual glitter, sparkle, Christmas trees, open fires and champagne – but it entertainingly subverts the usual tropes, by showing glamorous stars rejecting dull and stressful traditions including “Elf on the Shelf” (every parent I know loathes the wholesome, Mid-Western neediness of this plastic guilt-trap) and the tedious signing and sending of Christmas cards – freeing them to enjoy their own preferred traditions. The elf even gets an undeserved reprieve at the end.

The ad slogan – “This Christmas, do only what you love“ – seems to have caused deep, psychic trauma for all the self-diagnosed-as-selfless folk who spend every Christmas doing mostly things they hate, in order to please people who don’t care whether they do it or not. Relentless martyrdom and a turkey-scented sweat of self-sacrifice are hard-baked into the festive season like a silver sixpence into the homemade pudding that nobody really likes.

That bloody grinning elf, the gifts all wrapped by October, the badly-glued decorations, the racist old relations, the vast amounts of pricey food that will eventually die, forgotten, of freezer-burn… If we don’t do all that, we will be rejected from the tribe of happy families, cast into the freezing blizzards of our own selfish laziness. Christmas messaging, in fact, is still rooted in the demanding and church-going morals of the Victorians, with most festive adverts echoing and celebrating the hectic cheese dreams of Charles Dickens. We forget, however, that those people had servants.

A festive commercial that avoids the usual guilt-mongering while also depicting enjoyment and fun – and which doesn’t automatically revolve around the loving nuclear family – is deeply welcome. “Christmas is for everyone – do it your way” is the message all of us need, eyebrows-deep in the cost of living crisis and overwhelmed by pointless expectations.

M&S have read the room, and dispensed with the groaning feasts and laughing old-timers in the snow. Good for them. But while they’re being attacked on all sides for doing something new, they should stick firmly to their message. And they really, really, shouldn’t have apologised for the “Palestinian” party hats.