Sweep to St. Nick

Christmas. A time for family, giving, love and… adverts? Companies around the world now spend thousands trying to produce the years favourite Christmas adverts. Everyone has their own opinion. This year, I really loved the advert “Nicholas the Sweep” produced by Sainsbury’s.

The advert tells the “true” story of the time a young chimney sweep was wrongfully accused of stealing from Mrs. Sainsbury. He was consequently banished from his town where he had to sit alone in a forest in the middle of a snowstorm until Mrs. Sainsbury came to save him. She takes him back to town in a wagon, gifting him a bag of oranges as reparation for his wrongful punishment saying “If you can’t do something special for someone at Christmas, when can you?”. The young boy then hatches a plan, paying a visit to his old work place. We see him drop an orange into a sock at the end of each of the chimneysweep’s beds, whilst placing the corrected “naughty list” and a lump of coal in the sock of his ex-boss. The next morning the delighted children run out into the street and Nicholas walks away from the town, wrapped in a red blanket, with a red hat that a snowball lands on, creating an image that implies he is Father Christmas.

The advert, in its long and short cuts is very well done, although it is still not a patch on the 2014 Christmas advert, also produced by Sainsbury’s, “1914”

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