Share a Coke with Santa this Christmas!
There he is: jolly old Santa Claus, smiling joyfully, and holding a bottle of Coke for all to see. The legend that “Coca-Cola created Christmas” circulates every holiday season. But the reality of what Coca-Cola did to Christmas is slightly different from the legend. Instead of creating a culture out of thin air, Coca-Cola combined the most nostalgic and romanticized moments of Christmas culture in the past, then mass-distributed these moments to its large audience. Coke did not make Christmas; it used our feelings and memory to popularize it.
How did this “Christmas Culture” develop?
Ever since Christmas became a time for the family, there have been attempts to create a sort of “culture” around the holiday. The earliest instance of this was in the 17th century, where English folktales personified Christmas as a caring old man, known as “Father Christmas.” Although Father Christmas did not give any gifts or play with any children, he was a popular symbol of the cheer of Christmastime. Many years later, in the 19th century, an economic depression in America led popular author Washington Irving to publish a series of short stories about a Christmas celebration in a manor house. This led to the publication of many pieces of “Christmas Literature” such as Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Advertisements during this time also began to feature common icons of Christmas: reindeer, bells, and a fat, jolly Santa Claus were common in holiday advertisements.
Christmas became more romanticized throughout the late 1800s and the early 1900s. Santa Claus became more popular as a children’s character, as seen in books and magazines such as The Life and Adventures Of Santa Claus (1902) by L. Frank Baum, and Boys’ Life (1913) . However, these characters and symbols were still not viewed by society the way they are today. This all changed in 1931, when artist Haddon Sundblom published an advertisement featuring a now stereotypical Santa Claus.
Why did Coca-Cola’s Santa become so popular?
Let’s take a closer look at Santa Claus in this advertisement. At first, the image of Santa holding up a glass of Coke looks very novel and original. But on closer inspection, the imagery in the advertisement is very similar to past depictions of Santa Claus.
Santa is smiling and posing in the advertisement almost identically to his depiction in Thomas Nast’s “Merry Old Santa”, published in 1881. Nast’s image was the first depiction of Santa as a plump, jolly figure in a red coat. In fact, the majority of artists agree that “Merry Old Santa” was the first ever depiction of the “modern Santa.” The drawing of “Merry Old Santa” is not only similar to today’s Santa, but was also popular among the people. One columnist in The New Yorker even commented that in the drawing, Santa became a “local deity.” Needless to say, “Merry Old Santa” was a strong source of Christmas nostalgia for 1930’s America, and an advertisement reminiscent of this nostalgia immediately drew people closer to the Christmas culture that Coca-Cola presented to them.
Coca-Cola and Christmas literature
Haddon Sundblom continued to draw inspiration from past Christmases after his initial 1931 Christmas ad campaign. Most famously, he created a series of hand-drawn advertisements from Clement Clark Moore’s 1822 poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas”. This poem starts with some very familiar lines:
‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the houseNot a creature was stirring, not even a mouse…
Coca-Cola shaped Christmas culture into a culture of nostalgia, joy, and familiarity. However, it did not accomplish this by creating new, original symbols that instantly won the hearts of the people. Instead, Coca-Cola made old Christmas traditions more accessible, invoking a positive feeling toward Christmas that still exists to this day.
