There's a recent Christmas tradition that's become a deadly rivalry, with the honour of household names at stake – and their profits, too.
It's the annual battle of the adverts. Who can make us laugh, cry or ponder the most? Will it be John Lewis? Sainsbury's? Amazon? Or will Lidl, the Leicester City of the competition, pull off an outsider's victory against Waitrose with an unlikely film about a turkey farm?
It's all very exciting, and some of the films are great. Amazon's ad featuring the vicar and the imam has a genuine message, as well as helping shift stock (the point of the exercise, let it be remembered). John Lewis' film with the trampoline and the animals is good too, and benefited from Donald Trump's election victory; some digital genius replaced the little girl's head with Hillary Clinton's and Buster's with Trump's, making the moment when he streaks past her at the last minute to bounce away manically pure comedy gold.
These ads are made by very bright, creative people who are focused on one thing: selling. And they do that by being really, really tuned in to how people are thinking and what they really believe matters at Christmas time. They take people's real-life hopes and dreams, worries and desires, and bend them to their own designs.
Churches could learn a lot from them.
There's a repeated refrain in how churches promote Christmas, on websites, posters and leaflets. It's something like, "Come and discover the real meaning of Christmas". Or maybe, "Jesus is the reason for the season." Or even, "Put Christ back in Christmas."
However it's expressed, people get the coded message: Christmas isn't what you thought it was. We know what it's about and you don't. You think you've got it? You haven't.
It confronts; it contradicts; it challenges. And I really question whether that's a great marketing strategy.
Think about the sort of messages those ads are putting across. M&S's Mrs Claus, for instance. She's a motherly type who waves her hairy husband off on his rounds (("Don't forget Australia!") before transforming into a sort of Milk Tray woman to deliver a parcel to an annoying little boy's big sister. Mr Claus comes back to find her on the sofa reading 50 Shades of Red. It's a bit too knowing and zeitgeisty, but the message is that Christmas is all about forgiveness and family.
Or Sainsbury's, whose James Corden song has the perfect earworm melody. Its stop-motion film features a harassed father trying to make time to create the perfect Christmas: "The streets are chaotic, the shops idiotic, Granny's taking her time at the front of the line..." It concludes, "I want to find the greatest gift I can give my family – the greatest gift I can give is me." Christmas is about human relationships, not stuff.
We will pass over Aldi's Kevin the Carrot in silence, but Waitrose nails it with its "coming home" Attenborough-style offering. A cute little robin is shown on an Incredible Journey-style trek. It escapes a stoat, a hawk, a blizzard and a storm at sea, all in a sort of avian Planes, Trains and Automobiles quest to arrive at a Waitrose mince pie on a bird-table, shared in a magic beak-to-beak moment with its waiting feathery friend. It is a Scandinavian robin, according to the book of the advert, used to such odysseys; but the message is that home matters, and so does love.
And what about the biggest talking-point this year, the assorted wildlife jumping on the John Lewis trampoline – and Buster? The message is clear: everyone's included.
And if Christians come across as saying, "No, Christmas isn't about that at all, it's about the baby Jesus," it's like taking a party popper and shooting ourselves in the foot.
I think we can be a lot smarter about how we market ourselves, without compromising on the message we're putting across. Because yes, we do want to preach Christ at Christmas. Yes, it is the moment before turned to after, as the poet UA Fanthorpe put it.
But Christmas has had a long and complicated history of not being exclusively Christian – and now the marketplace is more cutthroat than ever.
So it's worth spending time looking at those ads and asking ourselves about how we wrap God's Christmas gift to the world. They reflect themes that aren't particularly Christian, but certainly aren't un-Christian. We can work with ideas about forgiveness and reconciliation (M&S), relationships (Sainsbury's), home (Waitrose) and inclusivity (John Lewis). These things aren't bad. They don't contradict our faith. We can say things that connect them with our Christian story rather than denying them.
We can build bridges and invite people to cross.
Follow Mark Woods on Twitter: @RevMarkWoods
