Best Christmas Ads: From Coca-Cola's 1931 Santa to the 2025 Season

Coca-Cola’s Santa and the first Christmas ads people kept

Christmas ads did not begin with Coca-Cola, but the version most people picture does. Starting in 1931, the illustrator Haddon Sundblom painted Santa for the company’s winter campaigns, and he kept at it for the next 33 years. His Santa was plump, warm and cheerful, a man you could imagine drinking a soda by the tree.

The model was real. Sundblom’s friend Lou Prentiss was the original face behind the illustrator’s Santa, which explains why the character looks so much like a particular, slightly tired neighbour rather than a myth. The paintings ran every winter, and over three decades they turned one company’s seasonal illustration into what many people assume Santa has always looked like.

That assumption is wrong in one respect. Santa had already worn red and white on magazine covers in the early 1900s, and White Rock Beverages used a Santa in soft-drink ads before Coca-Cola. Thomas Nast had drawn him in Harper’s Weekly in 1863, dressed in a stars-and-stripes outfit. Coca-Cola did not invent the suit. It made the face stick.

Holidays Are Coming and the red trucks

The second great Coca-Cola idea came in 1995. Holidays Are Coming showed a convoy of red delivery trucks covered in lights, rolling through a snowy landscape and lighting up everything they passed while people stopped to watch. It is one of the best Christmas ads ever made for a simple reason: the whole story fits into one image.

The trucks almost disappeared. The commercial was replaced in 2001 and returned in 2007 after consumers phoned the company to say the advert marked the start of Christmas for them. Few commercials are asked back by their own audience, and that did more for the ad than any award. The full story of the brand’s campaigns is in Coca-Cola ads.

Music carried the trucks as much as the lights did. In 2001 the singer Melanie Thornton recorded the campaign jingle as a single, Wonderful Dream (Holidays Are Coming), which reached number 3 on the German singles chart. Few seasonal jingles have crossed into the charts like that, and the advertising jingles page traces others that tried.

John Lewis and the British season of Christmas ads

In Britain, Christmas ads became an annual event largely because of John Lewis. The department store’s 2007 advert, Shadows, was part of a 6.2 million pound campaign, only the second time the store had used television. Presents were stacked so their shadow formed a woman and a dog in the snow, set to Prokofiev rather than a pop song.

The formula settled quickly. From 2008 the adverts used a cover version of a well-known song, sung softly. In 2011 The Long Wait showed a boy counting the days, then waking his parents to give them a present he had wrapped himself. It was a twist on the usual greed story, and it became the advert people expected every November.

The songs began to top the charts. A cover of The Power of Love from 2012 reached number one in the United Kingdom, and Lily Allen’s Keane cover for The Bear and the Hare followed in 2013. Monty the Penguin, in 2014, made the advert a national talking point, reviewed and argued over much like a new film.

Sainsbury’s 1914 and the long Christmas film

The same 2014 season produced one of the most ambitious modern Christmas ads. Sainsbury’s released a short film re-enacting the Christmas truce of 1914, when British and German soldiers stopped fighting along parts of the Western Front. The film followed a young English soldier in the trenches and arrived in November, a hundred years after the war began.

A supermarket re-staging a wartime ceasefire for a seasonal campaign was a bold choice, and it invited argument as much as tears. By 2014 the best Christmas ads in Britain were no longer thirty-second spots. They were short films of two or three minutes, released online first and reviewed like cinema.

Canada’s best Christmas ads: WestJet in 2013

Canada’s most shared entry came from an airline. In December 2013 WestJet released a video titled WestJet Christmas Miracle: Real-time Giving. Passengers waiting to board told a virtual Santa on a screen what they wanted for Christmas, and while they were in the air, staff went shopping. On arrival the wrapped presents came down the baggage carousel.

The video worked because the event itself was the advertisement. Nothing was scripted except the setup, and the faces at the carousel did the rest. It spread far beyond the usual reach of a Canadian television budget, and it sits among the Canadian commercials people still bring up each December, along with a long tail of imitators.

It also showed how the season was changing. A television spot needs a media buy, while a video needs only something worth forwarding. The WestJet film belongs as much to the story of viral marketing campaigns as to the history of Christmas ads, and it arrived in the same year as The Bear and the Hare.

Christmas ads in 2025: AI trucks and a nineties dance floor

The 2025 season opened with Coca-Cola repeating an experiment that had already caused trouble. In November 2024 the company released three short AI-generated versions of Holidays Are Coming, made to revive the 1995 commercial. They drew backlash online, including criticism from Alex Hirsch, the creator of Gravity Falls. The company defended the work.

In November 2025 Coca-Cola released another AI-generated Christmas commercial. Its executives said that this time was different, and that the craft had improved since the year before. Whether audiences agreed is another matter, and the wider argument about machine-made campaigns is covered in AI in advertising, dated as of 2026.

John Lewis went the other way in 2025, with a story about a father and his teenage son. Where Love Lives sends the father back to a 1990s nightclub after he finds a vinyl record, set to Labrinth’s reimagined version of the 1990 Alison Limerick song. The closing line reads: If you can’t find the words, find the gift.

What the best Christmas ads share

Across the list, the best Christmas ads share little on the surface. A painted Santa, a line of trucks, a boy with a badly wrapped present, a trench at night and an airport carousel have no style in common. What they share is one clear image or moment that a viewer can describe in a single sentence afterwards.

They also tend to keep the product small. The trucks carry the logo, but the drink barely appears. The John Lewis films barely show a shop, and WestJet’s video is about the passengers. Set the 2025 AI trucks beside the 1995 originals and you might ask which one you would describe to a friend next December.