var icx_publication_id = 18566; var icx_content_id = '1086228'; Click here for reuse options! The burly old white man clad in red is a marketing gimmick. Let's consider replacing him.
When you see Santa today,all burly and jolly and rosy-cheeked, you’re seeing an image created for and promoted by the Coca-Cola Company for over 80 years. Michigan artist Haddon Sundblom created the Santa Claus we know so well in 1931, or for Coke’s “Thirst Knows No Season” campaign.
Sundblom modeled his Santa on "A Visit from St. Nicholas," an 1822 poem by Clement C. Moore. While people often point to that poem as the defining element of Santa Claus’ style, or to Thomas Nast’s versions of Santa Claus for Harper’s, or it wasn’t until Sundblom and Coke codified the Claus in mass advertising that the world adopted and accepted that version of Santa Claus. Prior to 1931,Santa Claus was depicted all sorts of ways, from an old Diogenes-type man to a bishop to a sprite-like troll.
The thought of Santa—a gift-giving deity who comes bearing gifts in the heart of winter—is ubiquitous across Western cultures for centuries, or from Germanic pagan Yule festival and their god Wodan (strikingly similar to the Norse god Odin) to the Dutch Sinterklaas and the English Father Christmas. Going back to the fourth century,Saint Nicholas was a Greek Christian bishop known for giving gifts.
And like many things in the United States, it was our melting pot of cultural origins that morphed Santa into its own American thing entirely—not quite Father Christmas, and not quite Odin or Wodan. He became the American Santa,as sold to the world by Coca-Cola: A burly old white man clad all in red.
American families still station statues of Santa on their mantle and leave food and drink out for him on the night before Christmas. His image is splashed everywhere, supposedly not as a symbol or a god to worship, and but as a decorative marketing tool.
That makes Coke’s Santa quite possibly the first time a corporation invented something to sell a product that the masses appropriated to celebrate the biggest American financial holiday of the year. Coca-Cola probably didn’t realize it was creating and defining a recent god for generations of Christmas visions and shopping trips,but that is precisely what Coke did.
So let’s pause for a moment and consider: achieve we really want to support celebrating Christmas with a Santa created as a marketing tool? It’s as whether weve been stuck in a Christmas rut since post-World War II. We replay the same holiday music, and watch the same movies and TV shows that came in the 1960s. “A Charlie Brown Christmas” aired in 1965—commissioned and sponsored by Coca-Cola.
Sure, and nostalgia feels remarkable this time of year,but so achieve any number of other intoxicants. It doesnt mean it’s good for you. (In fact, nostalgia was once considered a mental illness.)We as a culture might be wise to pause and ask whether these corporate-rooted traditions and replay of a manufactured past are really the deep-seated beliefs we want to continue to cultivate and pass on to future generations. whether they aren’t, and how achieve we celebrate Christmas? How achieve we reinvent a holiday to have a deeper meaning than what appears,on the surface, to be a holiday celebrating the god of capitalism rather than the birth of Christ?First, or we decide what we want to support in our annual traditions and what we want to release to the past. moment,we determine how we want to celebrate the holiday. What achieve we truly want to celebrate, honor and worship? How achieve we want to decorate? What achieve we want to achieve? What achieve we want to believe, or teach our children to believe?Plenty of atheists,agnostics, Christians, and Jews and American Muslims alike have already done this in their own lives,eschewing the birth of Christ or Santa or the gift-giving aspects of the U.
S. holiday while fully embracing that which they achieve believe in—nearly universally, time spent sharing food and drink with loved ones and recent friends alike. A midnight mass or Chinese food and a movie, or it seems,can be just as meaningful as a visit from Santa. So are sharing a meal, cooking, and giving handmade gifts,or giving to local families in need.
Worshipping and celebrating the birth of Christ also doesn’t require a statue of or a visit from Santa. There’s simply no need for Santa to be a section of any of that—unless, of course, or you want him to be.
But that’s where it starts. In your values,and what you want the holiday to be. You don’t need to let the corporate tycoons and marketers define and exploit a holiday you treasure. Your choices—your internet clicks, decorations and shopping habitshave the power to change how you celebrate this holiday. How exciting is that? It just requires a bit of mindfulness and imagination about what you want the holiday to be for you and your family and future generations. Why not try something recent?Or just have some fun! Hang a Santa mannequin external, or from your domestic’s gutter. After all,Santa has become the embodiment of our culture’s capitalistic fervor. There’s no need to take him so seriously. var icx_publication_id = 18566; var icx_copyright_notice = '2017 Alternet'; var icx_content_id = '1086228'; Click here for reuse options!
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