Coke Christmas Items

Believe it or not, the Cola-Coca company had a tremendous influence on the modern-day conception of Santa Claus. Before Coke even existed, of course, the 1823 poem "A Visit From St. Nicholas" described "a right jolly old elf" with "a little round belly/That shook when he laugh’d, like a bowl full of jelly." A 1863 Thomas Nast illustration of that poem called Old St. Nick "Santa Claus" and also made him short and round. Other Victorian images depicted a similar bearded figure as tall and slender, and in a wide variety of coat colors from red to blue, green, and tan. The Coca-Coca Company, which started in 1892, had no trouble selling its signature soft drink in the summer. But by the 1920s, the company was looking at ways to make Coke an acceptable beverage for the winter. That decade, the company began to run Christmas shopping-themed ads with Santa Claus in "The Saturday Evening Post." In 1930, illustrator Fred Mizen painted a man playing Santa for a department store enjoying a bottle of Coke for an "Evening Post" Christmas ad. But it was really artist Haddon Sundblom who shaped the 20th-century image of Santa Claus. For 1931 Coke Christmas ads, he painted the real Santa Claus as a jovial, towering big-bellied man with red apple cheeks, a plush white beard, and a receding hairline. And, of course, he was holding a bottle of Coke in his hand. Sundblom used a retired salesman friend named Lou Prentiss as the model for his Santa. While other illustrators had shown Santa in a red suit trimmed in white fur, Sundblom's ads codified this look as Santa's true costume. He also made it standard for Santa to have a red stocking cap lined with white fur. These ads ran repeatedly in "The Saturday Evening Post" as well as "The New Yorker," "Ladies Home Journal," and "National Geographic." From 1931 to 1964, Sundblom defined Coca-Cola's image of Christmas. In his oil paintings, he showed Santa both delivering toys and playing with them, reading letters, interacting with children, and peeking into refrigerators, looking for a Coke. The American public loved these ads so much they obsessed over every little detail and wrote letters to Coca-Cola asking about Santa's belt or his wedding ring. These advertising images were adapted for store displays and billboards, as well as posters, calendars, playing cards, trays, drinking glasses, Christmas plates, and ornaments. After Prentiss died, Sundblom used himself as a model, and his Santa became shorter and more elfin than his previous incarnations. Rushton made plush Santa dolls with plastic heads based on this later Sundblom Santa, and in the 1960s, even produced an African American version of this Santa doll. For the 1942 Christmas season, Sundblom created the "Sprite Boy" character who appeared with Santa in Coke Christmas ads up through the 1950s. Despite what you might assume, the Sprite Boy character, an elf, was not promoting the Coca-Cola soft drink called Sprite, which was released until the 1960s. Sundblom's original Santa oil painting are now considered highly value works of art, which have shown at Louvre in Paris, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. In 1993, Coca-Cola debuted its "Always Coca-Cola" campaign featuring big white polar bears wearing scarves and drinking Coke in TV commercials and magazine ads. A Coke holiday commercial showed the adorable anthropomorphic bear family, including bear cubs, descending upon a Christmas tree. The images of these bears have been adapted for advertising products such as stuffed animals, Christmas tree ornaments, clocks, cookie jars, snowglobes, jigsaw puzzles, and more.