Joy to the world! December has come! And television ad breaks are suffocatingly festive.

Following the backlash experienced by their 1950s sorry 2012 Christmas campaign, this year Asda has opted to forgo advertisements full of sexism-laced festive cheer in favour of some – equally traditional – rival bashing and savings bragging.

Last year the supermarket’s winter advertising campaign revolved around a frazzled woman neurotically vacuuming up pine needles before embarking on a manic last-minute supermarket dash and single-handedly producing Christmas dinner, after which her retrosexual husband finally acknowledges her existence by asking: ‘What’s for tea, love?’

Asda is not the only supermarket to change its advertising tactics in response to the criticism of their blatant sexism they faced over their Christmas 2012 campaigns.

Tesco, which last year ran a TV advertisement in which Mum, swamped by everything going on the kitchen and aided by her Prince Charming husband only in the form of a glass of champagne, has this year opted for a sepia video montage of one family’s Christmases throughout the years.

Morrisons has similarly abandoned its unhappy, unappreciated Mum-centric campaign of Christmas 2012, going instead for Ant and Dec and an imaginatively named singing gingerbread man, Ginger.

While two months of screen time is enough to dampen anybody’s festive spirit, it seems that this year most major retailers have said bah that was humbug to their own outdated gender stereotypes, making the next couple of weeks less of a nightmare before Christmas.