By Linda Garrould · Last updated 4 September 2026
Christmas Countdown has been running since long before this site had a proper strategy, and one thing we’ve done consistently over the years, almost by accident, is write down the brands, catalogues and small rituals that made up an ordinary British Christmas — the ones that have since quietly disappeared, or changed beyond recognition, or turned out to matter more in memory than they ever did at the time. This page gathers that scattered archive in one place.
Nothing here is a definitive history. It’s a working collection, added to as we find or remember something else — and if you have a catalogue, a counter or a Christmas ritual you think belongs on this list, we’d like to hear about it.
The catalogues that arrived through the letterbox
Before online shopping, the run-up to Christmas was marked by which catalogues had landed on the doormat. Webb Ivory is the one readers ask us about most — a charity catalogue selling cards, wrapping paper and personalised gifts, distributed through scout groups and school fairs, with a quarter of every sale going to good causes. Boots ran its own printed Christmas catalogue for decades before folding it into an online gift guide; Sainsbury’s Christmas Magazine and the Waitrose Christmas Delivered brochure did the same job for the supermarkets, previewing the year’s food and gift ranges before anyone had heard the phrase “shop the collection online.”
And then there was Argos. Paging through the Argos catalogue — a good few hundred pages, no internet required — and putting a star or a folded corner against everything you wanted was, for a whole generation, the actual mechanism of writing a Christmas list. We covered the 2014 and 2015 toy predictions in real time; Argos retired the printed catalogue altogether in 2020, after nearly 50 years.
The magazine on the mat
Long before recipe websites, the Christmas issue of a food magazine was an event in itself. We went digging through some old papers and found the very first BBC Good Food Magazine Christmas Special from December 1989 — Sarah Brown, Madhur Jaffrey and Keith Floyd on the cover, and Delia’s trifle inside. One reader got in touch to say she’d lost her own copy of the December 1990 edition, chasing a stuffing recipe she’d never written down anywhere else — which says something about how much people relied on these annual issues before recipes lived permanently online.
Small rituals and seasonal signals
Some Christmas nostalgia isn’t about a whole shop or catalogue, just a small, specific, recurring detail. The WH Smith Christmas wrapping paper and cards range is one of those — still going, still a high-street fixture every November. So is the annual reveal of the Costa Coffee Christmas cup, which for a few years running was genuinely one of the first proper signs that the season had started, well ahead of any tree or advert.
What was under the tree
For four years between 2016 and 2019 we ran a weekly round-up of the best-selling toys and games on Amazon UK — 78 charts in total, since consolidated into one archive. It’s a genuine time capsule of what British children actually asked for across four Christmases, chart position and all — and a reliable way to lose twenty minutes remembering toys you’d otherwise have sworn you’d never think about again. On a smaller scale, the Meccano Meccanoid robot is exactly the kind of one-Christmas-only gift that this list exists to remember.
The shops and counters that are gone
Some of what we remember didn’t just change — it disappeared outright. Woolworths’ pick ‘n’ mix counter is the clearest example: every UK store closed within six weeks in the winter of 2008–09, taking the tubs, the paper bags and the little plastic scoop with it. We’ve written up what actually happened, what briefly came back in 2020, and whether there’s any real chance of a UK return.
The advert everyone still watches for
Some traditions are recent but already feel permanent. The John Lewis Christmas advert, running every year since 2007, has become exactly that — a fixed point in the run-up to Christmas that people now organise their own countdown around, complete with a release-date pattern, a soundtrack people actually buy, and an unofficial start-of-season status that plenty of older traditions on this page never quite had.
The cake with the mixed-up name
A Tunis cake — a plain Madeira sponge under a slab of chocolate and marzipan — was, for a generation of British households, the lighter alternative to a rich fruit Christmas cake, and specifically the one that came in the red McVitie’s box. Genuinely nostalgic, still findable in supermarkets in November, and one of the few things on this page you can actually still buy.
If you’ve made it this far, you’ll probably also enjoy wandering back through our Christmas markets and advent calendar pages — less about the past, more about doing this Christmas well.
Source for the Argos catalogue’s retirement: Forbes, July 2020.
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