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Coke denies claims it bottled familiar Santa image

By Jim Auchmutey, Cox News Service

Published December 10, 2007 at 12:05 a.m.

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No, Virginia, Santa Claus was not invented by the Coca-Cola Co.

The contention that Coke created the modern image of Santa in corporate red has become an urban myth in recent years. Recently, the BBC phoned Coca-Cola archivist Phil Mooney and put him on the radio to address the issue.

"I've heard more questions about it in the last five years than I ever did before," Mooney says. "I think it's the Internet."

His response is that a red-clad Santa actually dates to the 1800s, when illustrator Thomas Nast depicted him that way in Harper's Weekly, and the first American Christmas cards showed him in crimson.

That's not to say, though, that Coke didn't change the way Americans envision Santa.

The classic Koke Kringle appeared in 42 ads that ran on billboards and in magazines such as National Geographic from 1931 to 1964. Artist Haddon Sundblom painted him as a jovial, rotund, ruddy-cheeked fellow who bears some resemblance to a later creation of his, the Quaker Oats man.

By comparison, many 19th-century Santas looked lean and rather dour. And some of them, it's true, wore green and other colors.

The red outfit has provided fodder for conspiracy theorists.

"He wears the corporate colors . . . for a reason," charged James B. Twitchell in his book Twenty Ads That Shook the World. "He is working out of Atlanta, not out of the North Pole."

Archivist Mooney is adamant: "The fact that red was our corporate color was just a happy coincidence."

Snopes.com, a Web site that debunks urban myths, sides with the Coke archivist.

But a bit of intrigue surrounds Coke and its thirsty elf. Call it the mystery of the missing Santas.

The company owns 35 of Sundblom's Santa oil paintings and displays a dozen of them in the World of Coca-Cola museum in Atlanta. But Mooney couldn't locate two of the paintings until a few years ago when he sent some to be cleaned by an art restoration house. Sundblom, it seems, had painted new Santas over two of the originals.

"It was the Depression, and these illustrators were too cheap to buy new canvas," Mooney says.

Those painted-over Santas might be the only ones in Coke's portfolio who aren't wearing red.