It's the annual Christmas again, and although it's a foreign festival, it's the best excuse for young people to gather and relax after a busy day, but in fact today's Christmas is far from the traditional Western religious holidays of hundreds of years ago. Taking the image of Christmas representing Santa Claus as an example, the earliest costume was actually green, which is the picture below, so who turned him into red? The story begins at the beginning.
Regarding the origin of Santa Claus, it is widely believed that it was an Orthodox bishop who lived from the 3rd to the 4th centuries AD, St. Nicholas. Born on the Mediterranean coast, he came from a very wealthy family, was a philanthropist from an early age, and grew up giving gifts to the poor anonymously.
In the legend that has been passed down to this day, Nicholas in addition to giving gifts to the poor, will also give gifts to children, once he heard that there were three young girls from a family, because they were too poor to have money for a dowry, so they took advantage of the night to secretly throw the purse containing gold through the window, which happened to fall into the socks, and this story also became the reason why the Christmas gifts were to be put into the socks later.
After his death, Nicholas was buried in the Turkish city of Mira (later moved to Italy), and in order to commemorate him, he evolved his image of anonymous gifts to the poor as Santa Claus. As for the later posthumous Christian saint, that is, the addition of a "holy" word in front of the name, it is a matter of the nineteenth century, after all, the Orthodox Church and Christianity do not want to see each other, Xu is the image of Santa Claus later deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, everyone put aside the contradiction and gradually compromised.
During the long years of the Middle Ages, the legend of Santa Claus appeared in many versions, initially not accepted by mainstream society, but by many Germanic and Celtic pagans, who combined the image of Santa Claus with Odin in Norse mythology to form a new image of a long-bearded robe, a sleigh elk, and these all have a strong atmosphere of Nordic ice and snow culture.
Since St. Nicholas is a bishop, many people think of the cardinal we are familiar with, so subconsciously think that since Santa Claus's prototype is a cardinal, wearing red is a matter of course, if you think so, you are wrong.
It turned out that St. Nicholas, who was active in Turkey, belonged to the Orthodox Church, and the classic image of bishops in his sect was often a golden white dress or a black regular dress, which had nothing to do with red. Catholic and Christian bishops of the same period also did not wear red robes, but also dressed mainly in black and white.
Catholic and Christian bishops began to wear red, in fact, after the Middle Ages, it turned out that at that time, pigments were extremely luxurious commodities, and red was one of the most expensive pigments, and the price was often more than ten times the price of other pigments.
In order to show the nobility of status, bishops began to wear red robes, and this is how cardinals came. While the bishops fight whose color is more noble, the people are not very interested in this, and the image of Santa Claus in the folk is often dominated by green.
So why green?
Consider that Christmas tends to be in the cold winter, which is the time when we approach the winter solstice in the twenty-four solar terms in China. At this time, people who are plagued by severe cold often look forward to the growth of all things and the spring of vitality recovery as soon as possible, so they add a lot of green elements representing life in the festival, such as Santa Claus in a green robe, such as the evergreen Christmas tree and so on.
So in the beginning, the image of Santa Claus was green, so why did Santa Claus become red today? The image of Santa Claus in red that we are familiar with does not have a long history, and it is not yet a hundred years today.
In 1931, the fast-growing Coca-Cola Company began to promote its own commercial propaganda, considering that the United States had just experienced an unprecedented economic depression at that time, in order to gain people's good feelings, Coca-Cola specially chose the red color that could warm people's hearts as the theme color of its products.
In order to enhance the publicity effect, Coca-Cola found haddon Sundblom, an already famous painter at that time, whose illustrators were deeply loved by people with their avant-garde style, so let us always look at his "classic" works.
this...... People who should have mastered the "traffic code" in that era, it is no wonder that the Coca-Cola Company would find him, and under the bombardment of money, it finally knocked out the artist pride of Hatton Sambo, who began to draw a large number of promotional posters for Coca-Cola, and met Coca-Cola's requirements, redesigning the image of Santa Claus with its logo main color red, which is what we see it now.
With the outbreak of World War II, Coca-Cola was packaged as part of American culture, followed by American soldiers all over the world, the red image of Santa Claus gradually penetrated the hearts of the people, as for the earliest image of Santa Claus in a green robe, it was gradually forgotten.
Once the sea was vicissitudes, things were not human, and many of the cognitions we were accustomed to were often different at first.
2021.12.24(Early morning)