How Christmas past Will Keep on Haunting Us

To help illustrate Marc's thoughts, images were created by a series of prompts using Midjourney. 

Western cultural icons of Christmas are highly entrenched in our culture. Take a look through the current batch of advertising campaigns for the festive seasons this year and you will probably see fir trees, snowmen, bells, robins, poinsettia, Santa and more, and a colour theme of green and red to highlight berries and evergreen leaves. There are always exceptions that prove the rule, but you can count on most of those symbols turning up to communicate that Christmas is nearly upon us.

As many agencies turn to the use of AI generated images, we are relying upon software to mine our understanding of Christmas in order to create something new. So basically, we are recycling all of those nostalgic icons and turning them into a different composition.

1950's Christmas

To explore this, I used Midjourney and prompted it to create a series of images. These are the prompts I used - changing the year only to make things less complicated.

“It's the future, and the year 2089. Create an image showing a family at Christmas.

Create an image showing a traditional Christmas scene. The year is 2025.

It's the decade of the 1990's. Create an image showing a London Christmas city scene.”

2000's Christmas

I wanted to see what Midjourney would produce as a Christmas scene from the past, present and future and if it would continue to perpetuate the stereotypes - not surprisingly it did exactly this. My prompts requested the creation of pictures showing eras from the 1950s to 2200 and beyond.

You can see that there’s a range of scenes with identifiers, a certain car shape turns up in the 1970s to tell us where we are. Some show families on a couch together - indicating gatherings, though some appear to be laden with doom. One symbol that returns over and over is snow. It’s hard to remember the last time there was a ‘white Christmas’ in the UK, while some count one snowflake as a measure, it really needs to be a blanket and that was back in 2010.

2065's Christmas

As retail’s biggest moment, being clever and standing out in the communication of Christmas is important. Of course some icons need to stay in order to set a scene or let consumers know what we’re talking about - but the repetition of past commercial markers could probably do with a shake up. Unless we’re actually aiming for nostalgia and believe that it can cut through. Maybe the stereotypes are right. The quiet of the snow (that we don’t tend to see anymore due to changes in climate), the people you love in the same room (or on the same couch) and a moment to just stop and switch off. The past is a place where there are fewer noisy notifications and alerts, so maybe we could be designing a future that provides that peace and quiet but doesn’t need the tinsel and all those pine needles on the carpet.