Nov 4 2026 - 7:00am
It’s hard work being a grandparent in 2026. There you were, thinking that you’d earned some long-overdue rest, when all of a sudden you’re being propositioned by penniless grandchildren, whose few acts of decency are belied by a frustration that the Commons has once again quashed their hopes of euthanizing you. So what are you supposed to do? The answer — at least, according to John Lewis — is this: put on your finest cashmere and jump on a rickshaw.
That, in a nutshell, is the premise of John Lewis’s latest Christmas advert. Kristin Scott Thomas’s character, Gloria, is driven along Oxford Street in a rickshaw, in search of a present for her two spoiled and unruly grandchildren. She is accompanied by “Pickles”, a wooden toy dog that talks like a taxi driver and tells her to “Lighten up!”
Of course, this is all implausible. A rickshaw on pedestrianized Oxford Street? And one that plays Rolling Stones covers, instead of, say, Despacito or one of Pitbull’s lesser works? No chance.
Gloria’s grandchildren are equally implausible. Instead of being brain-rotted by screens, they’re unruly in the old-fashioned sense. They trample over grandma’s sofas, despoil her vinyl collection, and shred her coloring books. But how to save these children? Discipline? The naughty step? No! What they need is an expensive Christmas present — not the £30 cash that she had, initially, stuffed into their Christmas cards. Instead, she embarks on a merry shopping spree, gathering the materials to transform a playroom into something resembling an Ottoman brothel.
So what is this ad trying to tell us? Ever since John Lewis’s Christmas adverts blundered into national life in 2007, they have marked the beginning of the “festive period” by seeking to resolve one of the preceding year’s dominant trends. Each advert presents a sort of deadened version of contemporary discourse. So, in the heady days of 2021, a black child met a white female alien in a forest and introduced her to “Christmas”. And, in 2025, a raver-turned-centrist-Dad dragged his son out of the Manosphere by introducing him to Nineties dance music. And, this year, that “theme” appears to be the inability of Zoomers and Boomers to connect with one another — each misunderstanding the other from within their respective silos.
Really, though, it’s a sort of corporate prelude to the King’s Speech, albeit accompanied by a famous singer stripping a much-loved classic of its former verve: in this case, it’s Sam Fender banalizing You Can’t Always Get What You Want. But these grandchildren can get what they want: a little bit of cash; a small, annual danegeld, paid out of the Boomer Hoard. Thus, on opening their cards, the two children do the customary tap-and-shake — only, to their horror, there’s nothing there. Instead, they’re led to the new playroom, where they delightedly dance with their grandmother who looks overjoyed. “This Christmas,” we’re told, “give the gift of giving”: a rather heavy-handed attempt by the retail giant to dress up a sales pitch as a festive appeal to generosity, and coax cash-strapped Britons back into the shops.
The ad promotes the company’s usual message: spend more time with your family, and more on John Lewis products. And nearly 20 years since it first launched, the British public still hasn’t realized what this is: a hollow corporate exercise in virtue-signaling, designed to get you to buy its products.
