Share Your Gifts

A girl in an Apple ad is too scared to show anyone her drawings. She’s got canvases hidden away, sketchbooks locked in a box, the whole thing—artistic talent but paralyzed by the fear that it’s not good enough for anyone to see. A dog opens the window, wind scatters everything, and suddenly the neighborhood catches sight of her work. Nothing bad happens.

Share Your Gifts is this year’s Apple Christmas spot, done in Pixar-style animation. It’s emotional without being sappy, charming without being cloying, moving without making you feel like your life is empty by comparison. Which is to say it’s a genuinely well-made ad, the kind that works even though you know exactly what it’s doing—selling you on the idea that an Apple product is the way to share your creative self with the world.

And I’ll be honest, there’s something that lands about it anyway. The fear in that animation is real. Anyone who makes anything knows this particular paralysis: the gap between what you’ve made and what you’re willing to show. Judgment, comparison, the suspicion that you’re just not good enough. The ad is cynical in framing an iPad or MacBook as the solution, obviously. But the problem it’s identifying—that creative people need permission to be seen—that’s not invented for the commercial.

Billie Eilish’s Come Out and Play sits underneath it all, which helps. The song has a gentleness that the ad could’ve ruined with strings and schmaltz, but doesn’t.

What interests me most is that Apple’s actually pushing a MacBook here instead of shoving iPad-as-the-future-of-computing at us for the hundredth time. There’s something almost self-aware about that choice. Like they know that if you’re serious about making something, you’re going to want a real computer.

I watched it once and felt something move. Watched it again knowing how much money went into manipulating that exact feeling. Still felt something. That’s the thing about good advertising—it doesn’t matter that you see the strings. The story still works.