Let me bold it for you:
"Today, it is Sundblom's Santa who decorates everything from Coca-Cola cans to Christmas sweaters, from greeting cards to home décor"
That's the advertising guy Coca Cola hired for their campaign. He started producing those images in 1931and kept going through to 1964. The 'debunk' although correct in stating that it is an urban legend that the colours were adopted since they were those of coke never had anything to do with my point, the colours had been in transition for some time. And of course there is a continuity, perhaps even a homage to Nast, but the coca cola images are the ones where the progression more or less ended.
Why would the National Museum of American History get it so wrong (unless of course they don't...).
You're kind of rewriting the history of this meme. All the "Coca Cola Santa" people jump straight to "he used to wear green!!" rather than merely saying he popularized a Santa that was already the mainstream and made very slight alterations. EDIT: The only real addition to the entire look from the Nast Santa to the Sundblom Santa is that he the white trim on the hat and cuffs. But "added white trim to the hat/cuffs" is not what people are claiming when they say Coca Cola invented the Santa look - they're talking about the red coat, because red is the
primary color associated with Coca Cola, that's what they're saying was added. Santa was already really red and white: a red coat and bushy white hair. Sundblom just added a touch more white at the edges.
Sundblom merely decluttered the existing design a bit. Like, in 1881 he was wearing a backpack which presumably would have gifts in it, but Sundblom removed the backpack. But again, this is clearly
not what people mean when they say Coca Cola invented modern Santa. If you showed then the Nast Santa and lied to them and said "this is the 1930s Coca Cola Santa - the one where they turned him red" virtually everyone would believe you except a tiny minority of historians who'd point out that you're showing them the Nast Santa and not the Sundblom Santa. And that's the test here - almost nobody who believes the tropes could even tell a pre-Coke Santa from a post-Coke Santa, but
they believe they could tell them apart because of the "special knowledge" imparted to them as part of the "Coca Cola created Santa" legend. They're just wrong and have been misled. Nast's Santa merely lacks the white cuffs on the sleeves and the white trim on the hat, but you could very easily convince people that this is actually the offending Sundblom Santa, and they'd totally buy into it, missing that detail completely, which indicates how peripheral that detail is to the theory.
The real story here is that Coca Cola were extremely successful at
associating themselves with Santa such that people are easily convinced that Coca Cola's advertising was what turned Santa from green to red. Certainly nobody who actually believes the legend is talking about the minor design tweaks between ones of the generation of Nast's Santa and Sundblom's Santa.
Zooming in on a details such as mistletoe on a hat smacks of how pseudoscience works: having a pre-existing belief and zooming in on ever-less-important details to maintain the belief. In science terms the "mistletoe on hat" thing is on the level of honing in on noise in sample data below the leve of significance and claiming this proves a pre-existing overall theory correct, when in fact it's shifting the goalposts heavily. I really do NOT buy into the idea that the people who believe the Coca Cola Santa theory are believing it on the basis that the Sundblom Santa codified minor design variations in how Santa is drawn. That kind of thing is what scholars talk about, it's not the shit normal people mean when they discuss this: normal people do in fact mean "Santa is red because Coca Cola is red" and are not in fact saying "you know, there were slight variations in how Santa was drawn before this, such as the color or number of his buttons, whether he has white trim on hats, sometimes they even put a sprig of mistletoe in his hat, but due to mass media and the spread of advertising, Coca Cola managed to solidify minor details such as how many buttons Santa has, and that his coat sleeves have white fluffy cuffs". The real point here is that everyone who saw those ads was like "oh that's Santa" they didn't need to be told this is Santa. Sundblom merely took all the existing elements of Santa and made one that people would instantly recognize as Santa, which itself is proof that all those elements already existed, and this is the exact opposite of the urban legend that Coca Cola
changed what people thought Santa was meant to look like. Sundblom merely created the most Santa-esque Santa he could, and thus that one spread.
https://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/santa-coca-colaRead the title of the article "How Santa brought Coca-Cola in from the cold". Santa brought Coca-Cola in from the cold, not the other way around.
During the chilly winter months, the company faced a major problem: how do you convince customers that soda is not just a summer beverage, but should be enjoyed year-round? As early as the 1910s, they turned to Santa Claus for the answer, hoping the popular figure would help connect Coca-Cola to the holiday season.
...
In the early 1930s, Coca-Cola turned to Haddon H. Sundblom, an advertising artist with the D'Arcy Agency, to design a new Santa. Sundblom redrew Santa Claus as a plump, cheerful man with snow-white hair and dressed him in red and white—colors that had already become associated with Santa
Someone who's reading that who's already been infected with the ear-worm that says Coca Cola invented Santa's look to fit with their marketing is focusing in on the "dressed him in red and white" bit as an "aha!" moment because this validates their belief that Santa
didn't wear red and white before the Sundblom Santa. But that's not the claim the article is making. The fact that Coca Cola was already interested in Santa from 1910 onwards really blows a hole in the theory that the 1933 Sundblom Santa is the trope-codifier for the red and white thing.
Author
Topic: The small random questions thread [WAAAAAAAAAAluigi] (Read 686087 times)