Did Coca Cola create Santa Claus?

Christmas is coming! Now we’ve got Black Friday and Cyber Monday out the way it’s time for the Christmas themed blog posts… One thing that’s brought up every year is how Coca Cola created the modern day vision of St Nick himself.

Did Coca Cola create Santa Claus?

While a little digging shows this isn’t the case, Coke seem happy to peddle the myth with three pages of their website dedicated to it.

David O’Hearns from Dawn Creative skips forward in time to see how brands could hijack / make the most of Christmas.

Wooooosh.

It’s 2034. Due to competition, Royal Mail have reduced services to just cover the festive period. Their red and gold vans take to the streets for a month a year, delivering over 100 million parcels. They’ve become synonymous with Christmas, and decide Santa is worthy of a company sleigh…

It’s the year 2067. Amazon have declared last Christmas as their “best ever” with over £100 billion in sales. Over a third of all Christmas presents pass through their warehouses, and they employ 2% of the population to get parcels picked and packed.
In recent years, they’ve introduced festive elf uniforms, and we start seeing Santa accompanied by white and orange elves

It’s 2084. After seeing Royal Mail and Amazon write themselves into Christmas folklore to great success, marketing directors everywhere have spent the last decade trying to get a slice of goodwill. A Guardian survey reveals that over 70% of people feel the spirit of Christmas has been lost, and 26% admitted they’ve stopped celebrating Christmas altogether. Someone, somewhere, decides that when there was no room at the inn, Mary and Joseph booked a hotel instead…

Back in the present day… Black Friday and Cyber Monday suddenly seem more bearable. We can all be thankful we don’t have Big Macs and Bargain Buckets on the table replacing Christmas din… oh… Too late.

Merry Christmas everyone!