By Dr Nicola Harding, Producer at Big Egg Films

Every December, without fail, I sit down to watch the John Lewis Christmas advert with the kind of intensity normally reserved for academic peer review or trying to find the last parking space at Tesco. It’s a cultural ritual now. A national moment. A collective deep breath before the chaos of the season.

And usually, these adverts have a familiar flavour: whimsical, sentimental, charming… and geared ever so slightly toward the generation above us. The older millennials and Gen X crowd could appreciate them, sure, but they never quite felt like they were speaking to us. More like we were observers peering in on someone else’s emotional universe.

This year felt different. It felt like someone finally cracked open our memory box.

Why This One Lands

Part of it may be age; there’s a point where you suddenly realise nostalgia is no longer about sepia-toned childhoods, but about the worlds we built in our teens and twenties. The music. The messy houses. The ridiculous nights out. The friendships that glued us together until real life arrived, jobs, relationships, kids, heartbreak, responsibility, and rearranged everything.

But there’s something more democratic happening here too. Nostalgia isn’t usually class-neutral. A lot of British nostalgia is coded: the middle-class Christmases, the neat suburban lawns, the polished Snowman aesthetics.

This year’s advert? It’s different. It’s scruffier. Louder. More alive. It reflects the truth that for many of us who grew up working class, our most formative memories didn’t happen in picture-perfect living rooms. They happened in nightclubs, warehouses, fields at 3am, someone’s older cousin’s garage, wherever the music was loud enough that you could forget everything else. And a lot of us did have kids younger than the glossy lifestyle magazines assumed we would - which meant growing up while raising the next generation. It’s a specific kind of chaos that rarely makes it into mainstream advertising.

Yet here it is. On prime-time television. Wrapped in a story that hits you right in the soft, unexamined part of your chest.

Nostalgia as a Class Leveller

What fascinates me most is the levelling effect music and memory can have. A beat, a melody, a visual cue; it collapses class, geography, time, even identity. It’s democratic in the purest sense.

We all have versions of the same moments:

• The night we felt invincible.
• The song that rewired us.
• The friend who pulled us back to the dancefloor.
• The sudden, quiet realisation that adulthood had arrived whether or not we’d sent an RSVP.

Seeing that reflected in a big-brand Christmas advert is unusual. And telling.

When storytelling works, it doesn’t matter whether the narrative technically belongs to someone else. We project ourselves into it. We fill in the gaps. The story becomes a shared container where millions of private memories can coexist without contradiction.

This year’s John Lewis advert manages that rare thing: it gives everyone a road in. Those who grew up on indie discos, or jungle raves, or sticky-floored clubs. Those who had kids early. Those whose youth was vibrant and complicated, not pastel and polished. And those who simply recognise that tug of wanting to be both your old self and your new self at the same time.

Why This Matters for Creative Work

The most interesting part? This is still an advert. A brand message. A piece of marketing. And yet it’s stronger and more emotionally resonant than many full-length films trying to do the same thing.

That’s the craft. The alchemy.

Good storytelling doesn’t demand that people feel something - it simply makes space for something to rise. It doesn’t dictate the meaning. It offers the scaffolding and trusts us to build the rest.

And that’s why nostalgia is such a powerful tool. Not because it’s sentimental, but because it’s plural. It accommodates the many lives we’ve lived, the ones we’re trying to make sense of, and the ones we’ve quietly left behind.

For those of us working in creative fields, whether it’s filmmaking, research, music, or anything in between, this is a reminder of something important: people don’t connect with content. They connect with themselves inside the content. When you get nostalgia right, it becomes a mirror rather than a message.

A Final Thought

Maybe this year’s John Lewis advert feels made for us because, at last, our generation’s story is being treated as worthy of nostalgia. Not the curated “remember when” of catalogues and cosy firesides, but the real, messy, brilliant, lived-in nostalgia of growing up in a Britain that wasn’t always straightforward.

The kind with glitter under the nails, a half-warm WKD on the windowsill, the bass shaking your ribs - and a baby monitor on the bedside table a few years later.

That’s the beauty of storytelling done well. It meets you where you are, but it honours where you’ve been. It reminds you that your life, in all its chaos and contradiction, is worth telling.

And that’s something far more powerful than an advert has any right to be.

P.S

If you haven't seen the behind the scenes of making the advert.. please spend 90 sec's to have a watch.. its just as magical as the advert! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hD9bt7b2Co

Merry Christmas from us all at Big Egg Films!