Everybody has their favorite Christmas movie. This year, we’re seeing a new crop of releases, streaming online and in theaters. Rotten Tomatoes (rottentomatoes.com), the site that shares unvarnished consumer reviews of movies and TV shows, offers some help if you’re trying to decide what to watch this holiday season.

The current Christmas fare ranges from An Almost Christmas Story (Disney+), an animated flick about an owl who gets stuck in a tree headed for the prime Christmas spot in New York City’s Rockefeller Plaza. That one gets 100 percent favorable reviews on the Tomaometer. Several rungs down on the review ladder is The Merry Gentleman (Netflix). This Sweet Home Alabama Meets Magic Mike concoction centers on the attempt to save a small-town performing arts venue from bankruptcy by staging an all-male holiday revue. That one got an underwhelming 44 percent approval tomatoes.

What makes a good Christmas movie is open to interpretation. In a segment last weekend on NPR’s All Things Considered, the matter was debated by host Scott Detrow and one of the show’s producers, Marc Rivers—a self-professed film nut. Rivers talked about friends who always watch The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter during the holidays, even though neither film has anything to do with Christmas. He went on to say, “I think a Christmas movie can be whatever makes you feel cozy in the winter time—that makes you feel nostalgic for when you first watched (it) as a kid.”

There’s a two-minute Christmas movie called “The Gifting Hour” running on social media that gave me that cozy feeling. It comes to us from John Lewis & Partners, the UK’s high-end department store chain. The creative is courtesy of Saatchi & Saatchi, John Lewis’ partner since mid-2023. When you see it, you may well wonder if the production budget for this piece didn’t rival that of Home Alone II.

I would add that after dismal news about brick-and-mortar retail losing massive share to e-commerce for the past several years, things are looking brighter this holiday season. The new news is that brick-and-mortar store traffic is finally recovering after Covid, when we all sat on the couch in our soft pants and ordered from J. Crew. A Forbes article reported that conventional retail store traffic is already at 81 percent of pre-pandemic levels, and is expected to have fully recovered by the beginning of Q4 of this year. Two additional studies offer more hope for storefront retailers. In a consumer experience (CX) survey from CMS Wire, 70 percent of shoppers said they visit a brick-and-mortar store every week. Another study from the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC) found that 79 percent of consumers prefer shopping in-store versus online.

“The Gifting Hour” opens as the John Lewis store intercom tells shoppers that they will be closing in 15 minutes. A beautiful young woman (our harried heroine) is on a final-hour gift run. In her search, she parts some clothes on a store rack and emerges through the back of a wardrobe (a la C.S. Lewis) into a magical world of her childhood. In an attic stocked with memorabilia, she encounters her sister as a precocious young girl.

As the spot goes on, she repeatedly encounters her sister in a variety of ages—as a young girl telling her, “I don’t want a doll (for Christmas)!” to a teenager—“I want a nose ring,” and finally as an expectant mother going into labor. As she sweeps by, our heroine reassures her sister that the baby will come out just fine—we understand that she’s a visitor from the future and therefore knows how this will all turn out. Time telescopes backward, then forward again, where she meets her sister outside a pub. But when she opens the pub door, it’s another flashback to the past (as she interrupts her teenage sister in her bedroom kissing a boy). The imaginary past eventually dissolves into a skating rink and finally to a scene with her now-adult sister and young niece. The niece whispers into our heroine’s ear what her mom wants for Christmas. She goes back through the wardrobe portal into the present (gift in hand) and exits the store to meet up with her sister, having finally found the perfect gift. As the two sisters stand in front of a John Lewis store with snow floating gently down, a simple copy appears on the screen: “The secret to finding the perfect gift is knowing where to look.”

There are several things that make this spot shine. First and foremost, they began with a big idea—always a good idea if your creative product is destined for the smallest screen (i.e. somebody’s iPhone). There’s great storytelling here, too—a lot of plot packed into two minutes. But amid the twists and turns and as time telescopes back and forth, there’s a clarity to the story that speaks to its being well-shot and masterfully edited. 

Earlier I joked about the production budget. But here’s the deal: ideas like this can’t be pulled off on a shoestring budget with B-grade actors and a lot of green-screening. In other words, if you want us to travel back in time with you, don’t buy us a cheap ticket. The day will probably come when AI can flawlessly copy the real thing. But as this year’s holiday Coca-Cola spot demonstrates, AI still feels plastic and leaves you feeling a little gypped—like what you thought was your target rifle under the tree when you were eleven but turned out to be your sister’s drum majorette baton.

What knocks me out most about “The Giving Hour” is how well this brand understands the female shopping psyche. I know that may sound sexist or like I’m generalizing—but hear me out. Men, in contrast (and in general), don’t relate in the same way to the idea of giving the perfect gift. Why? Mostly, we hate to shop. So when we find something that’s “good enough,” we grab it and head for the cashier—‘cause who has time? But for women—especially when they’re buying for someone they really care about—good enough is never good enough. That’s the idea at the heart of this story. For all we’ve been through together, for all we’ve meant to each other, getting that perfect gift is worth every bit of effort—even if we have to venture back in time to find it.

I’ll be reviewing more holiday ads in the coming weeks. Like Christmas movie releases, there’s no shortage of them right now. And my favorite holiday movie? Elf, with Will Ferrell. Makes me laugh every damn time.

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