How Coca-Cola invented Santa Claus

Despite the passage of time, the image of Santa Claus remains as a friendly and reassuring presence. Symbol par excellence of the winter holidays, the gentleman with the long beard brings with him a bag full of emotional gifts, from the enchanted amazement of childhood to an adult and bittersweet nostalgia for lost memories and fantasies. Although today his imposing figure dominates the rooftops of the world in a red tunic edged with white, not all children knew him in such guise.

Who is Santa Claus? Not everyone knows that behind the most emblematic figure of Christmas hides that of a real man, Saint Nicholas. He was a bishop who lived in Myra (in what is now Turkey) in the 4th century, a very rich man and well-liked by his fellow citizens. Living between the 3rd and 4th centuries AD, Nicholas is accompanied by a suggestive story ancestrally linked to the myth of Santa Claus. What unites them is the role of children as benefactors but Saint Nicholas also brought as gifts (exclusively) to girls on the night between 5 and 6 December 3 golden spheres, a gesture to redeem them from poverty and misery through the granting of a dowry that allowed them to get married and escape a future of exploitation and prostitution. With Saint Nicholas, the embryo of Santa Claus is born and, consequently, that of his costume . Tall, slender and small, the bishop wore white clothes , white with gold-colored embroidery, or entirely golden tunics , to which was occasionally added a red cape , shades always present in the representation of the saints and symbolizing their virtues, from purity to faith, and which accompanied many of the subsequent depictions of Santa Claus .

Over centuries the image of Santa transformed drastically. England discovered the myth of Santa Claus as early as the 15th century, but it was only in the 19th century that Father Christmas became in all respects the emblematic and representative entity of Christmas, thanks to the work of two writers: Clement Clarke Moore and Charles Dickens. If Moore deserves the credit for having shaped the paunchy, corpulent and curly-bearded physique of today's Santa Claus in the poem The Night Before Christmas of 1822, Charles Dickens has the honor of making him a global celebrity, thanks to the presence of a similar figure in his masterpiece A Christmas Carol , published for the first time in 1843. In the famous story, the protagonist Ebenezer Scrooge encounters three ghosts in the night, that of Christmas Past, Christmas Present and Christmas Future. It is the cheerful Spirit of Christmas Present illustrated by John Leech that is the inspiration for Santa Claus' emerald tunic, complete with white fur trim.

Well yes, Santa Claus doesn't drink milk but Coca-Cola . This is the message that the company wishes to convey to consumers around the world for Christmas 1931, spreading the idea that Coca-Cola is not exclusively a summer drink to be enjoyed cold, but also a winter pleasure. Thus, advertising agent Archie Lee entrusts illustrator Haddon Sundblom with the task of creating a new image of Santa Claus, in line with the aesthetics of the legendary carbonated drink. Americans started to associate haddon's paintings with what they thought Santa should look like and sure enough everyone started to agree that Santa was a jolly fat in red suit wearing guy who gave out presents and of course love to drink Coke. The cultural impact of haddon's paintings was so big that Santa developed a fan base of observant fans for example, they noticed the time when Santa's belt buckle was strapped in the wrong direction and also the time that Santa was missing his wedding ring from Mrs Claus children even started to leave out Coke at night on Christmas Eve all because of haddon's ads Haddon would create his final version of Santa Claus in 1964. Coca-Cola continuing to create Santa ads in the same exact style as Hatton but just with different artists and because of this decades-long tradition of using Santa and their Christmas commercials Coke continued to cement the idea that they were a necessity during the holidays.