Re: Crowdsourced Christmas Cwestions

[der Mouse <mouse () rodents-montreal org>]

> > > "why is red a Christmas colour?"
> > Coca Cola.
> Crowdsourcing loses again!

I'm not convinced.

> Clement Clark Moore's poem was written in the early 1800s,

So what?  I can't see it as having anything to do with the question.
As you yourself pointed out (less directly), the only mention of red is
the line "His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry", and the
former only because red is the most likely rose colour for cheeks - the
most likely colour for cheeks in general, in that weather.

> and, even though it didn't get popular for another twenty years, the
> illustrated versions were enormously popular by the mid-1800s.

Were red coats ubiquitous in those versions?  Or was that the later
versions?  (How common were colour illustrations in the mid-1800s?)

> Coca-Cola didn't jump on the bandwagon until early in the 1900s.
> Obviously they thought the congruence of colours was a good marketing
> match, but they hardly influenced the choice.

I actually think they did - they influenced by emphasizing.  Even if we
posit a reasonable mix of colours in the pre-Coke illustrations of
CCM's poem, Coca-Cola lending their advertising budget's weight to the
red ones would very quickly overshadow all the others.

Consider, for example, how few Santas have clothes "all tarnish'd with
ashes and soot"; the modern Santa, while doubtless tracing some of its
history to the Visit, has plenty of other influences in the mix.

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