h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Thats right, the Santa Claus that you know so well was created by Coca-Cola for an ad campaign beginning in the 1930's. Haddon Sundblom was the artist who made the visual look for the current Santa Claus.

Each Christmas for thirty-five years, Santa appeared in a new pose in the Coca-Cola advertisements.

Sorry to ruin your lives, but the current Santa was just a marketing ploy to sell more coca-cola.

And another thing... what's the link between the easter bunny and eggs? shouldn't it be like "The Easter Duck"?

I think you may find that it was Santa who invented Coca-Cola, and not the other way round, as you suggest.

And yes the Easter Duck does lay Easter Eggs, as witnessed by the Easter Bunny's.

I do hope you are cheered up by this news.

Merry Christmas.

Poppycock. My mum and dad invented me.

At the beginning of the 1930s, the burgeoning Coca-Cola company was still looking for ways to increase sales of their product during winter, then a slow time of year for the soft drink market. They turned to a talented commercial illustrator named Haddon Sundblom, who created a series of memorable drawings that associated the figure of a larger than life, red-and-white garbed Santa Claus with Coca-Cola. Coke's annual advertisements -- featuring Sundblom-drawn Santas holding bottles of Coca-Cola, drinking Coca-Cola, receiving Coca-Cola as gifts, and especially enjoying Coca-Cola -- became a perennial Christmastime feature which helped spur Coca-Cola sales throughout the winter (and produced the bonus effect of appealing quite strongly to children, an important segment of the soft drink market). The success of this advertising campaign has helped fuel the legend that Coca-Cola actually invented the image of the modern Santa Claus, decking him out in a red-and-white suit to promote the company colors -- or that at the very least, Coca-Cola chose to promote the red-and-white version of Santa Claus over a variety of competing Santa figures in order to establish it as the accepted image of Santa Claus.

This legend is not true. Although some versions of the Santa Claus figure still had him attired in various colors of outfits past the beginning of the 20th century, the jolly, ruddy, sack-carrying Santa with a red suit and flowing white whiskers had become the standard image of Santa Claus by the 1920s, several years before Sundlom drew his first Santa illustration for Coca-Cola. As The New York Times reported on 27 November 1927:


A standardized Santa Claus appears to New York children. Height, weight, stature are almost exactly standardized, as are the red garments, the hood and the white whiskers. The pack full of toys, ruddy cheeks and nose, bushy eyebrows and a jolly, paunchy effect are also inevitable parts of the requisite make-up.

Santa Claus was around well before Coca Cola. However there was no standardised version, sometimes he was small, sometimes tall, usually dressed in furs, but sometimes dressed in clothes of blue, or red, or green.

In 1885 Louis Prang, a Boston printer, brought the British custom of Santa on Christmas cards over to america, featuring a chubby Santa in Red. This image soon bacame the popular image of Santa.

The coca cola company may have used this image but they sure did not create santa. See www.snopes.com for more information.