Every December the claim goes around again: Santa Claus wears red because of Coca-Cola. It’s a good story, and it’s wrong. But the real story is arguably more impressive, because it shows how a single advertiser, painting the same character year after year, can settle what a cultural figure looks like.
Santa before Coca-Cola
For most of the 19th century, there was no agreed Santa. He was drawn as a tall, gaunt man, a small elf, a stern old figure and sometimes something close to frightening. The most influential early artist was Thomas Nast, who drew Santa for Harper’s Weekly starting in 1862, first as a small, elf-like figure supporting the Union during the Civil War. Over roughly 30 years of drawings, Nast changed Santa’s coat from tan to red.
So the red suit came first. What was missing was a single, consistent, warm version of the man inside it.
Coca-Cola’s winter problem
In the early 20th century, soft drinks were seen as summer products. Coca-Cola wanted people to drink Coke in December too, and it began Christmas advertising in the 1920s with shopping-themed ads in magazines like The Saturday Evening Post. Its early Santa ads used a strict-looking Santa in the Nast style. In December 1930, a painting by artist Fred Mizen showed a department-store Santa in a crowd, drinking a bottle of Coke.
Enter Haddon Sundblom
In 1931 Coca-Cola commissioned Haddon Sundblom, a Michigan-born commercial illustrator, to paint Santa for its Christmas ads. The brief was to show Santa himself, not a man dressed up as him.
Sundblom went back to Clement Clarke Moore’s poem “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” better known as “’Twas the Night Before Christmas,” with its jolly, round-bellied figure. His Santa was warm and human: rosy cheeks, a full white beard, twinkling eyes and laughter lines. He worked from a live model, reportedly a retired salesman friend, and later used his own face in a mirror.
Sundblom kept painting Santa for Coca-Cola for 33 years. The ads showed Santa delivering and playing with toys, pausing to read letters and enjoy a Coke, and chatting with children who had stayed up to meet him.
Why it stuck
- Repetition. One artist painted essentially the same Santa every year for three decades, in some of the most widely read magazines in the country.
- Warmth. Sundblom’s Santa was friendly and approachable at a time, during the Great Depression, when people welcomed a cheerful image.
- Reach. Coca-Cola’s ads ran in magazines, on billboards and in stores across the U.S. and later much of the world.
- The color fit. Coca-Cola’s own red matched Santa’s coat, which is one reason the myth took hold.
What Coca-Cola really did
Coca-Cola’s own history is careful on this point: it did not create Santa Claus or his red suit. What it did was fix a specific version of him in the public imagination, the jolly, human, grandfatherly figure that most people now picture without thinking about it.
Sundblom’s other work for the company included the Sprite Boy character, created in 1942. But his Santa paintings are his legacy, and they are still used in Coca-Cola’s holiday marketing today. Few advertising images have outlived their campaign so completely.