Merry Kitschmas: The Art of a Tacky Christmas

The Christmas season has always been one associated with kitsch and tackiness. From gaudy glitter baubles to mismatched handmade ornaments, the festive season is, indisputably so, a brief period of collective nostalgia.  

This begs the question of how Kitschmas and our desire for a repetitive, comforting and nostalgic Christmas aesthetic fits into our current artistic and cultural movement towards sterile minimalism and AI-generated art that simply reproduces and then devalues authentic, human-made art.  

Naturally, media is one of the main ways Christmas nostalgia and aesthetic associations with Christmas are forged. Year after year, we watch the same 90s and 2000s Christmas films to recreate a sense of childlike nostalgia. Love Actually, The Muppet Christmas Carol and Home Alone are all examples of community and family-oriented films that reproduce this sense of nostalgia. They’re merry, colourful, heartwarming and fully encapsulate what is meant by Kitschmas.  

Alternatively, Christmas adverts are hotly anticipated every year by consumers and are an example of how corporations also push an image of Christmas nostalgia. Whilst always a little superficial, these adverts are a useful example of how companies both advocate and benefit from a kitsch, quintessentially nostalgic Christmas aesthetic.   

Contemporary Christmas media, in such an AI saturated era of art and writing, feels so bleak and disingenuous

The 2013 John Lewis Christmas advert perfectly encapsulates this. A hibernating bear finding community at Christmas in an idyllic, hand-drawn, Winter landscape. This, paired with the dulcet tones of Lily Allen’s ‘Somewhere Only We Know’, makes it one of the most memorable and heart-warming Christmas adverts to date.   

Sadly, this is potentially why contemporary Christmas media, in such an AI saturated era of art and writing, feels so bleak and disingenuous. The decline of Kitschmas, festive nostalgia and sentimental joy in 2025 can best be proven through the recent cataclysmic AI-generated Coca-Cola advert.   

For years, Coca-Cola has essentially used the same Christmas advert to advertise the drink. Now, however, one of the most globally recognised brands in the world has been “thrown behind the generative AI boom”, embracing the use of AI in the creation of their main Christmas advert.   

Simply put, the ad is really quite bad. Visually, it’s disturbing; the animals look lifeless, with soulless eyes and eerie smiles. The Coca-Cola trucks appear to glide along the roads on useless wheels, the background blurry and distorted. All in all, it’s clearly been hastily put together and harshly strays from previous beloved festive ads, instead replacing them with the AI slop we see all too often today.   

This sludge is not only the direct result of AI overuse but also undeniably the result of Coca-Cola lay-offs. For this ad, around 20 members of Coca-Cola were recruited. In previous years, however, this number would have been closer to 50 or 60. Nothing screams Kitschmas and holiday merry making quite like AI slop and worker redundancies!  

Despite this Coca-Cola ad, which has been adequately rinsed in the media for its absurd and boring use of AI, Kitschmas (luckily) persists. Fundamentally, the people want tacky and aggressively festive art.   

People want to return to a ‘simpler’ time, one they associate with childhood, bright colours and a lack of curative responsibilities

It may be for economic reasons – to have a kitsch Christmas you can cheaply make or upcycle your own gaudy decorations and still have it fit the aesthetic requirements of this seasonal ‘movement’. Or it may be for social, cultural reasons – Christmas is a portal into our childhoods and Kitsch décor allows us to reimmerse ourselves in that childhood magic which we both believed in and treasured. Or it may even just be a way to take a break from the post-modern, sterile, minimalist artistic hellscape we find ourselves in.

Ultimately, the cultural interest in nostalgia and ‘kitsch’ decor always peaks at the end of the year. After a long year of work, sad minimalism and inflated prices, people want to return to a ‘simpler’ time, one they associate with childhood, bright colours and a lack of curative responsibilities.  

Embracing kitschiness is fun, it’s festive, and its proven year after year that it’s what we all want. In an era of growing artistic laziness and reliance on energy-sucking AI to reproduce what humans have been creating for decades, it is more important than ever that we embrace the playful ‘more is more’ attitude that kitsch promises and provides.