The holiday season presents a distinct challenge for copywriters. Holidays, by nature, rely on familiarity, comfort, nostalgia, tradition. We want the seasonal beats of stories to be on time and told with heart, and if you don’t hear what you expect to hear, it just doesn’t feel right.

As writers, we have to acknowledge those very human needs and norms, especially when the holidays intersect with messy realities (pick one). But there are words and phrases that get re-gifted year after year after year, landing them on our naughty list:

Gifting made simple/easy

We live in a time of Amazon Prime. It is already prettttty easy to give a gift, so the effectiveness of this imploration is considerably blunted by one-click ordering. Also not sure if convenience is a value-add as you move up the premium scale of gifts that are supposed to convey special feelings?

The Ultimate Gift Guide

Gift Guide is a necessity for search optimization, totally reasonable. Ultimate, however, vexes us. Beyond overuse, it always felt a bit like a 90s toy commercial. Not really congruent with beauty messaging, especially since its core definition as an adjective is linear versus hierarchical. As a modifier it’s far closer to “final” and “last,” which grants an undeniable morbid humor to the idea you’re reading “Your Final Gift Guide.”

New Year, New Me

Or anything else to replace “me.” Gyms of America: hear us, because it’s hard to believe this one is still around in mainstream ad copy, taken past the point of parody for years now. But it still pops up in creative briefs and marketing sessions when New Year’s Resolutions get mentioned.

Turkey Day

It’s all so very live-laugh-love-with-my-morning-Starbucks-and-fuzzy-Uggs. There’s a hominess to it that can be reassuring, for sure. Still, it doesn’t scream sophistication in beauty copy, it doesn’t do too much for our vegetarian and vegan friends, and it skews us away from, y’know, giving thanks for friends and family.

Treat yourself to…

We’re adults! We treat ourselves to things all the time! And that’s perfectly ok, treating yourself can be a beautiful thing. But this phrase is applied to nearly every real or imagined holiday, ad nauseam, so at this point it’s part of the online wallpaper.

Christmas starts early this year

No it doesn’t. Actually, it starts on the 25th. Every single year, it turns out. Look, no one will stop the tide of Christmas messaging after Halloween. For some brands, Q4 is 75% of the year’s revenue, so we get the desire to drag Christmas forward on the clock. We just need to ease people into the holiday season and cut back on the backlash when this phrase pops up on Día de los Muertos.

Tis the season of xx

This phrase, as well as the clunky “Give the gift of xx,” violates a cardinal Antonym rule: if you’ve never heard anyone speak like this in real life, you shouldn’t use it in copy. Sometimes, when writing about benefits or heightening a sense of product romance, the rule unavoidably gets stretched. But generally, if it sounds artificial to you, there’s an excellent chance it will make you sound artificial to others.

Glow

Give the Gift of Glow, Get Your Holiday Glow On, The Season of Glow … Is glow the most overused word in holiday socials? Possibly, and with good reason: it’s short, it’s alluring, it conveys warmth, and everybody wants to glow with magic from the inside. Like they do in Hallmark movies, with stars from the early 2000s traveling from the big city and falling in love while stranded in perfect holiday-themed towns.

RSVP

For your friend’s birthday party or a baby shower? Yes. A sponsored cocktail hour? Of course. Messaging that deploys RSVP as merely a marketing phrase to get you to buy something now conveys a sense of false urgency for a party that doesn’t exist. RSVPing also doesn't guarantee a "yes," so maybe we're RSVPing NO to glowing skin? How about something more akin to “Adding xx to your holiday calendar” or similar?

Glam

Again, the perfect shorthand for a sparkly, clubby, Bowie, hint-of-raunchy aura. It fits perfectly into monosyllabic, alliterative holiday copy (“Give the gift of glam,” anyone?), which makes it so tempting to writers. But its universal application has neutered an otherwise libido-forward word. Not every tinted lip balm or brow gel can, genie-like, summon Studio 54 via the invocation of glam, though we wish it were so.

The Nixed List: Holiday Special