Christmas? Get real.

Christmas ads on the box. Brace yourselves and loosen your belts because the servings have only just begun and there are 41 days to go to the Big Day.

I'm already feeling the way you do at around 5.30pm on the 25th when having being told to get your ar*e off the settee and your eyeballs off the box and your ar*e in the car, you're shuttled off to 'auntie' Betty's and others who couldn't come to yours because they have their own tribe at theirs, only to find that the turkey got there before you. And oooo, look! Turkey sandwiches...yum! By the end of next week we'll be yearning for the Thompson Holiday ads on the 26th.

The one that gives me a sore head is the John Lewis Bear and Hare effort. Like the Woolworths beanos of yesteryear, theirs is the most hotly anticipated ad and has come to be (for some) the televisual opening of the first window of the advent calendar. Looking at the Woollies ad above (and the others you'll find there) it's going to be very hard for some to believe that theirs was the ad of the season, but their strategies of booking entire commercial break spots and using the biggest names around are still very much in vogue, as incongruous as it was to see a celeb earning squillions caressing a £4.99 Pifco hair dryer! But back in the hay days of  Lenthéric, that was the wonder of Woolies.

Back to John Lewis. Well crafted and scripted, it hits all the right notes and for me that's what's wrong with it. It's mawkish and, I think, a little cynical and manufactured. Was the first line of the brief make it a two box of tissues per showing ad? If so I guess (judging by the number of views on YouTube and plaudits online) they were successful but all I see is something that's had money thrown at it. It reeks of what do we do to keep on top...that's all I see. It's not a patch on 2011's The Long Wait. Or 2012's The Journey.

Another great example of more is most definitely less comes from M&S. More money down the drain than down the rabbit hole. It's little more than a showreel for Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, the best turn being Helena Bonham Carter who appears to be morphing into Sybil Fawlty. For all its gloss and cinematic production values it doesn't work as hard as their 2012 offering. At least it showed the products and the different audiences they're trying to reach, but this year's is little more than a vanity project for the marketing department.

And I'm not even going to waste time on Morrisons' effort because it's pants, other than to say that their reliance on Ant and Dec is beginning to grate and signals a lack of thinking at the heart of their operation.

I began writing this yesterday before Sainsbury's launched their pitch for our collective sobs and at that point Tesco was my favourite. The basic idea is not an original one but it is very nicely done and much joy is to be had in spotting the tank-top you used to wear or identifying with the scenarios shown. It's well cast and there are some wonderful micro-moments within it. But then I saw this from Sainsbury's, which is going to make that Bear fall out with his mate the Hare because he got up and got cold for absolutely nothing at all.

Both Tesco and Sainsbury's have chosen the 'real' route, staged, in the case of the former, but Sainsbury's had the sweet idea of asking customers to submit footage of their Christmases and, John Lewis, that did make me cry. It's a mirror-ball for the nation. Which of us can't identify with it? The little chap leaping around going into meltdown in his jim-jams made me LOL! and I saw my own small brother doing exactly the same thing all those years ago. The don't like it's are there alongside the I love it's. The prospect of a traditional fall-out in the offing. It happens. And the chap planning and cooking Christmas lunch with military precision only to sit and eat it alone broke my heart. But that's what happens. And then the squaddie dad returning to his totally cute and unsuspecting children broke it again all within the space of a few minutes. That rarely happens. Functional or dysfunctional, we can see through this that we're not so mad, bad, odd, not that much different at all.

Sainsbury's, you're the orange in my stocking this year.