Why does father christmas wear red

His bright red suit and hat are relatively modern inventions, only becoming common and recognisable over the last hundred years or so. So why does Father Christmas wear red on Christmas cards? When did he start dressing in scarlet, and what did he wear before that? Read on to find out. The legend of Father Christmas is loosely based upon the real historical figure of Saint Nicholas of Myra. The patron saint of children, Saint Nick lived from to AD. He was well known during his life for secret gift-giving, particularly to poor children.

In England, people have been personifying Christmas that is, turning the idea of Christmas into a human figure since the s. But he only became known as Father Christmas in the mids. One of the earliest known depictions of the personification of Christmas comes from And for many centuries, the legendary figure of St. Nick was indeed portrayed as wearing long, sweeping robes. By Victorian times, the image of Father Christmas had changed somewhat.

For one thing, he was often depicted as a gnome so he could fit down chimneys. While he was uniformly drawn as an older man with white hair, everything else about him was muddled: he could wear full robes or regular clothes, and his outfit could be any colour — such as yellow, black, green, brown, or sky blue.

Like Saint Nicholas, he was a character filled with cheer, goodwill and gifts for everybody to enjoy. However, Father Christmas wore green rather than red, supposedly to symbolise the coming of spring.

Over the years, Father Christmas and Santa Claus have become one, which means they both wear red. The original pictures featured Santa wearing a tan outfit, but over the next thirty years, it was gradually transformed into a red suit. The fat and jolly Santa Claus that we know and love today was first created for an advertising campaign by Coca-Cola. He was commissioned by Coca-Cola in , when the Great Depression was well and truly underway and the company wanted to bring something new to the table.

They asked Sundblom to come up with a Santa who would symbolise Christmas, while also being realistic and relatable to customers. In this poem, Santa is described as jolly and plump, with rosy cheeks, twinkling eyes and dimples. An illustration by Thomas Nast , Merry Old Santa, featured a plump man in a red-suit, with a pipe and a rosy complexion.

Coca-Cola began to use the red image of Santa on advertising in the s , when the company hired artist Haddon Sunbloom to create a character of Santa Claus for use in festive campaigns. The idea was to ensure people continued to drink Coke during the winter months, as the drink was associated with warm, summer days. The red suit was a convenient feature of the character as it matched the advertising colours of the company.

This red-suited, rosy-cheeked Santa was used in numerous Coca-Cola adverts, and probably helped to cement the modern image in the minds of Americans and the ubiquity of the drink around the world meant it became one of the most widely-seen depictions of Santa Claus. However, the version of Santa Claus created by Sunbloom was based on an already standard depiction. The depiction of Santa Claus as a red-suited old man has been in existence since at least the 19th century.

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