What does Mrs Claus do while Santa travels the world delivering gifts? We finally know, thanks to M&S’s 2016 Christmas campaign.

The ad features stylish Mrs Claus driving a snowmobile and piloting a helicopter to get from Lapland to London to deliver a gift for a missed letter.

It was about time that Mrs Claus became more than a background bit character.

It feels as though this was made to challenge incorrect perceptions of women, and older women, in particular, and the advert even hints towards this. At the end, as Santa comes home, Mrs Claus pretends to have fallen asleep while reading a book, when she has actually been on an adventure of her own. It’s a clever visual representation of how an older woman may be perceived (as the type of person who falls asleep reading books, rather than the type of person who flies helicopters) and how stereotypes may be incorrect.