Can Nostalgia Save Christmas Creative?

In the creative world, nostalgia can sometimes feel like a dirty word. 

Just because I love an approach, doesn’t mean it’s right. I’m a sucker for nostalgia and anything that nods to the 80s and 90s, but brands on the whole want to look forward. 

Creative briefs ask for something fresh and ‘culturally relevant’ that nobody has seen before. And it can be thought that looking backwards is lazy marketing. 

However, I’d argue there’s one rather large, tinsel-covered exception. 

CHRISTMAS! 

Let’s face it, Christmas is built on looking backwards, whether that’s re-watching Home Alone, digging out the same decorations or listening to songs released decades before you were born. 

People cook the same food and repeat the same traditions. 

In fact, at Christmas, familiarity isn’t the enemy of creativity, but perhaps one of its greatest tools. 

Christmas = Nostalgia Heaven

There’s something a bit strange about spending eleven months of the year chasing the new, only for December to arrive and suddenly have everyone collectively decide they’d quite like to lean into the good old days. 

Some of the biggest Christmas campaigns from previous years haven’t fought against nostalgia at all, but built their ideas around it. 

John Lewis went particularly hard in 2025 with its Where Love Lives campaign centred on a dad receiving Alison Limerick’s 90s dance track on vinyl from his son. As the record plays, he’s transported back into his memories of clubbing in the 90s before returning to Christmas Day with his family. 

The past isn’t a decorative reference in the ad, but the entire emotional mechanism behind it.

Vodafone turned back the clock even more when its campaign travelled through four decades of festive communication, from brick phones in the 1980s through texts and video calls. After first running in 2024, Vodafone brought the campaign back the following Christmas, saying it had been one of the most enjoyed and credible ads in recent years. 

Even newer festive properties are starting to become nostalgic themselves. Aldi’s Kevin the Carrot has now been appearing at Christmas for more than a decade to the point where he no longer requires an introduction. Christmas at Aldi means Kevin the Carrot, it’s that simple. 

It’s an interesting thing about Christmas creative; do something for long enough and eventually people start wanting you to do it again. 

Maybe we’re too frightened of familiarity 

Creative people are trained to question anything that feels like it’s been done before, and most of the time that instinct serves us well. Nobody needs another brand arriving late to a TikTok trend and congratulating itself for being culturally relevant. 

Christmas is slightly different though because familiarity is part of the appeal. People don’t necessarily want it reinvented every year; they want the songs, films, decorations and little traditions that make the season feel more recognisable. 

It means nostalgia is less of a creative shortcut and more of a language, provided there’s still an interesting idea behind it. 

Nostalgia isn’t the idea 

Simply making something look old isn’t a strategy. Adding VHS fuzz to a piece of social content doesn’t automatically tap into some shared Christmas memory. 

The strongest nostalgic creative tends to take something recognisable and give it a new purpose. It should open the door to the idea rather than become the entire idea itself. 

And you don’t need a John Lewis budget 

We wrote recently about why brands shouldn’t sit Christmas out on social, because one of the things holding brands back is the sense that festive creative has to be huge. 

When the season is dominated by enormous TV campaigns, it’s easy for smaller brands to wonder what they can realistically add.

Nostalgia gives them a way in because triggering a memory doesn’t require a two-minute cinematic epic. Social actually gives brands the chance to be much more specific, tapping into the tiny shared experiences that people immediately recognise. 

It’s that kind of recognition that will travel. People see something, connect it with their own Christmases and hopefully share it with someone who remembers the same thing. 

Familiar can travel 

Most brands don’t have decades of Christmas advertising heritage to draw from, but their audiences have decades of Christmas memories. Creative can tap into those memories without pretending the brand was ever part of them.

Find the right cultural truth and give people something familiar to recognise, but fresh enough to talk about, and suddenly looking backwards doesn’t feel lazy at all. 

All that to be said, nostalgia won’t save bad Christmas creative, but used well, it might give people a reason to actually feel something about it.