Did Coca-Cola Invent the Modern Image of Santa Claus?

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Did Coca-Cola Invent the Modern Image of Santa Claus?

Snopes
By David Mikkelson
Dec. 18, 2008

Among the pantheon of characters commonly associated with the Christmas season (both the religious holiday and the secular wintertime celebrations), the beloved persona of Santa Claus is somewhat distinctive in that his appearance is neither one that has been solidified through centuries of religious tradition nor one that sprang fully-formed from the imagination of a modern-day writer or artist. Santa Claus is instead a hybrid, a character descended from a religious figure (St. Nicholas) whose physical appearance and backstory were created and shaped by many different hands over the course of years until he finally coalesced into the now familiar (secular) character of a jolly, rotund, red-and-white garbed father figure who oversees a North Pole workshop manned by elves and travels in a sleigh pulled by eight reindeer to deliver toys to children all around the world every Christmas Eve.

Although we can identify some of the most influential sources who contributed to the formation of the modern Santa Claus figure (such as writers Washington Irving and Clement Clarke Moore, historian John Pintard, and illustrator Thomas Nast) no single person or institution can lay claim to having created him. Nonetheless, we humans prefer definitive answers: We want details about time, place, and source and tend to eschew ambiguous, indefinite, open-ended explanations. We don't find satisfying the notion that Santa Claus is an evolutionary figure with no single, identifiable point of origin, so instead many of us have clung to the more satisfying, pat (and somewhat cynical) explanation that the modern appearance of Santa Claus was a commercial creation of the Coca-Cola company, who cannily promoted a version of Santa garbed in their red-and-white corporate colors.

It is true that, since Santa Claus is an evolutionary figure, he did not suddenly appear fully-formed one day and immediately supplant every other character traditionally associated with Christmas. However, it is not true in any realistic sense that Coca-Cola "created" the modern Santa Claus: they did not invent the now-familiar rotund, bearded fellow clothed in red-and-white garb, nor did they pluck him from a pantheon of competing, visually different Christmastime figures and elevate him to the supreme symbol of Christmas gift-giving. The red-and-white Santa figure existed long before Coca-Cola began featuring him in print advertisements, and he had already supplanted a bevy of competitors to become the standard representation of Santa Claus before he began his tenure as a pitchman for Coke.

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https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-claus-that-refreshes/

[Cyber Liberty]

It's nice to see that Snopes is using AI for their writeups.

[unite for individuality]

The modern Santa Claus is derived from the European version of him,
which has more of a "Father Christmas" look about him.

They actually look pretty similar.  The main differences are,
the European version is not quite as rotund,
his beard is not as wide or bushy, but still pretty full,
and his coat is much longer, down to his knees.

In Europe, this version is still seen much more widely than is the Coca-Cola version.