Why does santa wear red

Gift Memberships. Code of Conduct. Gift Certificates. Group Visits. Birthday Parties. Private Events. Special Events.

Full Calendar. Public Events. Family Programs. Homeschool Programs. Girl Scout Events. Member Events. Museum at Home. Holiday Events. Join Our Team. 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. Santa's gifts rarely miss the mark; he is, after all, the world's number one toy expert.

The same cannot be said of the rest of us. Prof Waldfogel's most famous academic paper The Deadweight Loss of Christmas tried to measure the gap between how much various Christmas gifts had cost, and how much the recipients valued them - beyond the warm glow of "the thought that counts". This wastage figure seems to be fairly robust across countries. To put it into context, that is about what the World Bank lends to developing country governments each year.

And that is before pondering the strain put on the economy by squeezing the retail spending together in a single month rather than spreading it out - and the time and aggravation devoted to the process of shopping, which is not always pleasant during the December rush.

So other economists have examined alternatives to clumsy gift giving. Gift cards and vouchers do not help as much as one might hope: they are often unredeemed, or resold online at a discount. If you must buy a gift card, note that vouchers for lingerie sell well below face value on eBay, but vouchers for office supplies and coffee hold up pretty well.

Wishlists fare better. Research suggests that recipients are generally delighted to receive an item they have already specified. Givers may be deceiving themselves to think an off-piste gift will be more welcome. Santa Claus relies on a polite wishlist from good children. Who are the rest of us to think we can do better?

Instead of being human, she was based on the Mother Goose character from nursery rhymes. It is true that, in the s, The Coca-Cola Company started using Santa in its advertising campaigns during the holiday season -- a time when sales were traditionally down, as fewer people consumed soft drinks during colder weather. The company claims eagle-eyed fans watched its Santa ads every year, ever alert for changes such as the man in red appearing without a wedding ring or wearing his belt backwards.

Like Nast, Coca-Cola also unsuccessfully attempted to create a new supporting cast for Santa. The red suit, bushy beard and rotund shape of Santa Claus are often attributed to a Coca-Cola advertising campaign, but their origins date back to cartoons created during the U. Thomas Nast's cartoon 'Santa Claus in Camp' is often credited with being the first popular depiction of today's Santa Claus, despite the jolly old elf's pointed beard and star-spangled jacket.

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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.