A VERY BRITISH CHRISTMAS: WHEN OLD TRADITIONS MEET NEW

There’s nothing as classic as the traditional British Christmas. A heartwarming image that you can picture instantly – a snow-dusted cottage, à la The Holiday, an evergreen tree decorated with colourful baubles, and groups of carol singers sipping mulled wine.

It is a vision lifted straight from Victorian postcards and BBC period dramas – nostalgic, cosy, and reassuringly familiar. Yet our modern Christmas, the one we look forward to each year, is built just as much on more recent additions to the festive season, which in 2025, is as likely to include staples such as spectacular department store windows, tear-jerking adverts, LED-lit forest trails and commercialised Christmas markets.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the rituals we’ve adopted almost without noticing. Consider the John Lewis Christmas advert: barely fifteen years old, yet treated with the reverence once reserved for the monarch’s Christmas speech.

Every November, its release is awaited with the kind of anticipation previously saved for the Christmas No. 1 in the charts.

The same is true of London’s great department store windows, which transform retail spaces into seasonal spectacles that are landmarks to be visited in themselves. A century ago, a Christmas window was a charming form of enticement into Christmas shopping; today, it is a marketing must-have for city department stores, and the unveiling of Harrods, Liberty, Fenwick or Selfridges is a cultural event.

Few places capture the essence of modern British Christmas quite like these windows: unapologetically commercial, yet filled with enough magic and craftsmanship to feel genuinely meaningful. They’re not selling a product so much as selling a feeling – nostalgia packaged in velvet, warm colours, and glitter. Each year the displays are bigger and better than the last, as shops desperately try to keep up with competition during this peak festive window, when shoppers are out to spend money in droves.

Even long-standing brands have found themselves absorbed into festive myth-making. The Famous Grouse Christmas advert, with its quietly humorous grouse strutting through the winter landscape, has become a seasonal signifier as familiar as the first frost. Fortnum & Mason’s hamper catalogue, a sugary dreamscape of gilded tins and jewel-toned preserves, is another. These are not merely marketing exercises; they are annual rituals that signal the start of the season.

But perhaps the most striking transformation is how commercial spaces have recast themselves as modern-day festive destinations. Christmas markets – once a novelty borrowed from Germany – cover the country from Aberdeen to Bath. In cities, towns and even shopping centres, wooden chalets appear overnight like a whimsical migration. Here, glühwein flows freely, artisan ceramic baubles shine, and the air smells of cinnamon, roasting chestnuts and consumer delight. The effect is undeniably romantic, but it is also entirely constructed – an imported tradition that the British have embraced with wholehearted sincerity.

Alongside the markets are the winter light trails, an even newer seasonal invention. With their LED forests, glowing animals and technicolour canopies, these illuminated walk-throughs feel like Christmas rewritten for the age of spectacle. They’re part fantasy, part social-media backdrop, part family outing, and, crucially, now feel like something Christmas “should” include, even though ten years ago they barely existed here. Once again: a commercial creation sliding seamlessly into the nation’s sense of tradition.

What all of this reflects is not a loss of authenticity, but an evolution of it. Christmas in Britain has always been a patchwork of influences, from Santa Claus (originally the Dutch Sinterklaas) to the Christmas tree, popularised in the 1840s when Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were depicted around a decorated tree at Windsor.

Victorian reinventions to Dickensian sentiment. Our current era simply adds a new layer, in which commerce – deployed lavishly, cleverly, and with a touch of theatre and wonder – becomes an integral part of how we celebrate the most wonderful time of the year.

If anything, this blend of older and modern enriches the season. There is no contradiction in attending a candlelit carol service one night and queueing to see the Selfridges windows the next. Nor in baking mince pies on the same day you order a showstopper Christmas dessert. Christmas has never been purely traditional or purely commercial; it has always lived somewhere between sentiment and spectacle.

And that is the charm of the contemporary British Christmas. It is bigger, brighter, and more intricately choreographed than ever before (and yes, it does seem to get earlier every year!) yet it still feels, somehow, like coming home. Our festive customs may now include brand unveilings, viral adverts and curated Christmas markets, but the emotions they tap into – nostalgia, anticipation, and a sense of belonging – are as old as the festive season itself.

In the end, what we call tradition is simply a set of rituals we choose to repeat every year because we enjoy doing so. By that measure, the glow of a department store window or the arrival of a much-anticipated advert is every bit as “traditional” as a carol or a cracker. The new British Christmas is not replacing the old one; it is expanding on it – adding new rituals to old ones, and reminding us that reinvention, when done thoughtfully and sensitively, can feel every bit as timeless.