Shane Watson

Why all you want for Christmas is a nice new sofa

Oh well. You thought Christmas couldn’t start any earlier or get any stressier. Unfortunately, it could and it just has.

Here’s how they’ve done it. (Can’t work out who

they are, exactly, but there is evidently a committee of professionals employed to ratchet up the pressure from one Christmas to the next. Booked your turkey? Already drawn up a present list? All perfectly sustainable? Well done. Nice try. But this year you’ll have to do better.) This year, the committee of maximum pressure at Christmas have moved on to Sofa Shaming, and not-quite-cosy-and -Christmassy-enough Home Shaming in general.

You’ve probably noticed the ads: order your sofa now, “in time for Christmas”. Up until this point, none of us has given any thought to our sofa’s Christmas appropriateness and now you need a really special one to make Christmas perfect.

There it is, brandnew sofa, on the list just below a reusable tree and extra wine glasses. You have family coming to stay. You need a turkey (organic), a Christmas cake (homemade), a lot of drink, but for now you need to rewind and take a long, hard look at your soft furnishings.

That’s how they do it, whoever they are. First they plant a seed of doubt, leading to self-flagellating thoughts along the lines of… “I am going to be judged for my inadequate sofa; what sort of person can’t make their sitting room look nice for the day of maximum sittingroom exposure? My sofa is lumpy. It doesn’t say hygge and happy families. It needs restuffing at the very least. I hate my sofa. It’s a metaphor for my soggy, saggy life”, and so on.

Of course, Sofa Shaming is just how they get in. It’s entry-level domestic inadequacy stoking. Start with Sofa Shaming and, pretty soon, it will escalate into “Dear God, look at the state of the place! Look at the grouting! People other than us are going to be using this bathroom! What will they think!”

B&Q don’t sell sofas, so their latest ad focuses on Bathroom Shaming: “Do you expect my mother to sit on that?” hisses a woman to her husband. Yes, she’s talking about the loo seat; she wants him to refit the bathroom in preparation for his mother-in-law coming to stay at Christmas, and she’s not joking. And neither are we by the end of the ad because, come to think of it, the downstairs bathroom loo seat falls off every few weeks, and we don’t want our motherin-law coming a cropper or, more importantly, concluding that we are a lazy slattern.

Ikea are not stopping at sofas – why should they? – when they can go for full Room Shaming: “That crack in the wall needs addressing, the state of the floor is just depressing” goes the soundtrack to their new Christmas ad, Silence the Critics.

They’re not saying nip to Croydon and get one of our everlasting Christmas trees and a reindeer centre piece. They’re saying get the builders in. At the very least, you could paint the place, and build your sister’s twins some bunk beds that look like a rocket.

This is the first Christmas ad Ikea has done – interesting or what? They’ve caught a whiff of seasonal affective Sofa Shame, run with it and taken it to its logical conclusion: fix the whole place up, top to bottom, and you won’t be anything shamed on the day.

So. Forget the Ocado order, don’t bother ordering the drum kit from Argos. Get the heating fixed so it’s toasty warm, get some throws, get some cushions, get a new rug. Think first of how your home will look on the big day. Now the Christmas countdown starts with a colour chart, a boiler service and, above all, a brand-new sofa.

Fix the whole place up, top to bottom, and you won’t be shamed on the day