Get your hanky out and watch the video before you read this.
A German supermarket chain, Edeka, has raised the stakes in tragically beautiful Christmas adverts.
The assembled great minds of the internet have already hailed it as even more of a tear factory than John Lewis’s “Man on the Moon” piece.
In the ad, which has been viewed on YouTube almost 10m times, a lonely old man comes up with drastic measures to bring his family together for Christmas.
With a flair for emotional manipulation, he fakes his own death.
It starts with the man, played by British actor Arthur Nightingale, receiving a voicemail from his daughter telling him that, once again, the family won’t make it home for Christmas.
He sits alone at the dinner table, enduring yet another lonesome Christmas.
In the next scene, his children, all busy in daily life, get the news that their father has died.
One of the sons, on a business trip to China, starts crying and another fights to hold back tears in his job at hospital.
They all meet at their father’s house, grieving and dressed in black, but to their astonishment find the table set for dinner and their father, obviously alive, emerging from the kitchen. “How else could I have brought you all together?” he asks.
The loneliness of the elderly at Christmas was raised by John Lewis in its Man on the Moon ad, which has been viewed almost 20m times.