The story of how red and green came to represent Christmas isn’t as linear as the string lights around your tree
verybody who’s decorating for Christmas knows to do so with red and green. But the story of how red and green came to represent Christmas isn’t as linear as the string lights around your tree.
Yes, certain traditions of the holiday, like the green of mistletoe and the red of Santa’s garb, might seem like obvious sources for the tradition. But it’s not quite that simple, according to Arielle Eckstut, author ofEckstut’s research found that holly, with its green leaves and red berries, long played a role inthat predate the spread of Christmas.
“It’s like a lot of things that have to do with culture and color, where it’s some combination of a natural phenomenon mixed with other cultural forces,” she says. The cultural forces here? Particular credit goes to 1930s Coca-Cola advertisements that featured paintings of Santa Claus as we know him: old, plump, jolly, red-faced and white-haired, with a red outfit to boot. This depiction of Santa didn’t really exist in collective cultural consciousness before the soda company’s advertisements, Eckstut says.
Santa Claus is depicted in this 1935 Coca-Cola advertisement by Haddon Sundblom, who painted St. Nick for the brand for decades.After a 1930 campaign used images of what was clearly just a regular man in a Santa costume, rather than an image of the “real” Santa, Archie Lee at the D’Arcy Advertising Agency wanted something more wholesome and genuine, according to Justine Fletcher, director of archives for Coca-Cola.
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