Why does santa wear red

Mr Moore - who penned the line "'Twas The Night Before Christmas" in - did as much as anyone to create the American idea of Santa Claus, the red-robed patron saint of giving presents to everyone whether they want them or not.

It was in the s, too, that advertisements for Christmas presents became common in the United States. By the s, Santa himself was a frequent commercial icon in advertisements. Retailers, after all, had to find some way to clear their end-of-year stock. In Boston in , 10, people paid to see Charles Dickens give readings of his Christmas Carol - a story light on biblical details and heavy on the idea of generosity.

Down the coast in New York the same year, Macy's department store decided it was worth keeping the doors open until midnight on Christmas Eve, for last-minute Christmas shoppers. Its first line: "Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents.

Prof Joel Waldfogel, an economist and author of Scroogenomics, has been able to track the impact of Santa on the US economy back across the decades.

By comparing retail sales in December with sales in November and January, Prof Waldfogel has estimated the size of the Christmas spending bump all the way back to , the era of the Coca-Cola Santa. In fact, relative to the size of the economy, Christmas spending was three times bigger then than now.

What is an everyday indulgence today would have been a once-a-year treat back in the s. Prof Waldfogel has also compared the US Christmas boom to other high-income countries around the world.

Again, perhaps surprisingly, the US's December spending boom is not particularly large, relative to other countries. You can find more information about the programme's sources and listen online or subscribe to the programme podcast. In the grand scheme of things, Christmas is a modest affair, financially speaking. After all, you would have lunch anyway, pay your rent, fill your car with petrol and buy clothes to wear.

However, for certain retail sectors - notably jewellery, department stores, electronics, and useless tat - Christmas is a very big deal indeed.

Economists and moralisers do not often find themselves having common cause, but on the subject of Christmas we do: we agree that a lot of Christmas spending is wasteful. Time, energy and natural resources are poured into creating Christmas gifts which the recipients often do not much like. His image of Santa quickly became something akin to an official portrait. Why Nast settled on red is hard to say.

Some have suggested there was a link with the iconography of the original St Nicholas, who is often depicted in red robes, but more likely is that it just felt aesthetically right, chiming with the rosy-cheeked, red-nosed Santa of the poem, and with the red outfit playing off the whiteness of the fur, beard and snow — Nast was the first to portray Santa as a native of the North Pole.

But within a generation the battle was over, and by the mids no self-respecting Santa would have been seen in anything but red. Both took the externals Nast had laid down but sought to humanise Santa by portraying him more naturalistically than their predecessor. The definitive image of the red-robed one was, however, the product of hard-nosed commercialism. 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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Santa, of course! This holiday, we got to thinking about that deep-red suit … why does Santa wear only red? Why not green, blue or white?

Before we began writing this blog, we thought the best way to get the answer to our question would be to ask Santa himself while he was visiting the museum. And this is what we found ….

Many believe Santa wears red because of Coca-Cola. While there is no question that the soft-drink company has been influential in depicting the jolly man we all have come to know and love, the truth is St. As the Bishop of Myra in the 4th Century, his traditional robes were red and white.

While some historians argue that he originally dressed in different colors, the fact is that after the bishop, who was known for his generosity and kindness to children, passed away, his legend grew, and that included his scarlet apparel. Looking for more Never Stop Asking "Why?

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