This small bar in Northern Ireland is stealing hearts around the world with a touching ad that has gone viral

(CNN) — Christmas ads have become a staple of the season for many retailers, from Disney to British department store John Lewis. These ads often contain short morals and stories.

But Charlie’s Bar, a small company in Northern Ireland, beat everyone else this year, creating a moving ad that went viral on social media amid praise from users that highlighted its “beautiful message” and its “emotional” story.

A video posted on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok this Friday shows an elderly man laying flowers on his wife’s grave before walking through the streets of Enniskillen, trying to greet strangers who don’t notice him.

So, he enters a bar, where he sits alone until a friendly dog ​​approaches him, and after a while the pet’s young owners follow him, and they all drink together.

The video, which lasts more than two minutes, ends with a quote from poet WB Yeats: “There are no strangers here, only friends you’ve never met.”

“There’s often loneliness at Christmas time…that’s why the story is about kindness,” Aoife Tegue, the content creator who shot and edited the ad, told CNN.

“It’s about spreading the love and knowing that there are people who are alone at Christmas, who don’t see it as a magical time and who feel very lonely. Taking that first step to talk to someone and the impact that can have on their day.

Charlie’s Bar has been serving residents of the small Northern Ireland town of Enniskillen, 130 kilometers southwest of the capital Belfast, since 1944 and has been in the same family all that time.

His manager, Una Burns, worked with Teague on commercial production. Teague said Burns and a friend came up with the story after meeting several clients who were lonely.

Then, after they storyboarded the ad “basically on a piece of paper, not in a professional way,” Teague shot it in three hours.

All four of the advert’s stars are local, with Teague explaining that “the couple were friends from Una who had a lovely dog” – Missy – and Martin McManus, who plays the old man, plays a local community theatre.

As of Thursday, the video has racked up 1.2 million views on TikTok alone since it was posted Friday night, as well as more than 147,000 likes on Facebook, with Teague saying the response “hasn’t really sunk in.”

Its impact extended beyond social media, sending messages to people around the world, including some in Canada, the United States and Germany, “who either relate to the video or the video means a lot to them.”

“Even strangers who might come to the bar alone this Christmas to buy a drink or have a chat called the bar and donated money,” he said.

“I think this video really affected people in ways that we hoped, but also in ways that we didn’t imagine.”