Christmas shopping became truly popular around 1820 with retailers featuring holiday specials and only two decades later newspapers dedicated a whole section to solely holiday shopping advertisements. The newspapers gradually began using the images of Santa Claus to draw people in, and soon Santa was being used everywhere to advertise Christmas specials.
In 1841 a shop in Philadelphia featured a Santa Claus to attract customers, and thousands of children flocked to see the man climbing into and out of a chimney. Soon other retailers followed suit and began offering glimpses of live santas in their stores to draw in children and parents. This became so popular that the tradition has carried on over a century later.
Through the following decades, the styles of Santa’s dress changed in various ways, only solidifying into the one we recognize today in the 1920s and 1930s. Contrary to what quite a few people think, the Coca-Cola advertisements were not the first instance of the red-suited Santa. The origin of the red suit is actually in the late 1800s, and was further cemented by Norman Rockwell from the 1910s to the 1920s.
It was in 1931 when an artist named Haddon Sundblom created the original Coca-Cola Santa Claus, using himself as a model. He painted a new tableau of Santa every year for the next 33 years, firmly sealing our conception of how the jolly old elf should look.
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