Christmas, everything we know has been decided by the companies

Here we are: it’s THAT day of the year. Christmas. With his lights, presents, Santa Claus and songs who have been accompanying him since November 1st (for info: contact Mariah Carey). Everything seems to want to arouse the magic, the atmosphere and the nostalgia for a time when we weren’t even born. Here: that period actually never existed. No one wants to be the Grinch of the situation, but we must admit it to ourselves: the Christmas we are experiencing these days, like the one we have experienced in recent years, is just a bunch of inputs that marketing has tried to feed us. Succeeding, however, given that we have been shaped by it. The popularity of Christmas and its growing commercialization have gone hand in hand, influencing each other up to the present day with the Christmas season now starting in early November. And it was precisely marketing that stimulated both of these trends and the story of how it all happened can provide us with some fascinating insights into how society can shape itself.

The origins of commercial Christmas

Although the Italian popular tradition is rich in traditions and recurrences linked in part to folklore and in part to religion (the nativity scene, for example, is our “exclusive”), here too the Commercial Christmas arrived as in the United States only in the twentieth century. The development of industrialization acted as a watershed between a before and after of commercial Christmas: here, as in the United States (which has influenced us on several fronts), modernity initially brought a sort of nostalgia for simplicity of the harsh past life. Globalization has done the rest: moving the symbols of Christmas here and there around the world. Over the years, the Penny Press played a vital role: the stories it reported, as well as the “advertisements” that appeared in these newspapers began to build pieces of Christmas tradition, many of which have been cemented in popular culture.

According to some, for example, the popularity of Christmas trees can be traced back to a picture in the Godey’s Lady’s Bookthe most widely read magazine at the time, in which the Queen Vittoria and her family posed gathered around a decorated fir cwith some candles. However, the real Christmas boom came thanks to the spread of department stores, which in the USA saw an incredible business opportunity in giving Christmas gifts and started decorating them creating the holiday aesthetic we associate with Christmas today.

Other details, we owe them to some entrepreneurs: for example the Christmas cards that we see in American films were born thanks to the German printer Louis Prang who wanted to create a market for his newly invented color printing technology. Not to mention the Christmas balls. They too are a marketing product: in fact, in the oldest images (and also in some Disney films) the trees were usually adorned with candles. The idea of ​​spherical ornaments was from owner of FW Woolworth department store who decided to mass-produce them in Germany and sell them cheaply. A success.

Coca-Cola has shaped the image of Santa Claus

Red hat with white pom pomas well as his beard: if there’s anyone who didn’t know it, the chubby old man who brings presents to children on Christmas night gave it to us Coca Cola. In fact, until the first promotional images of the famous drink, Santa Claus was known in the tradition of the countries of northern Europe and for everyone he was St. Nicholas. The figure of him began to enjoy some success in the United States thanks to the poem of 1822 A Visit from St. Nicholas (now more popularly known as The Night Before Christmas). His figure, however, was not well known to public opinion: so the department stores, with a little help from the magazines of the time, helped to remedy this.

In 1841, a life-size Santa Claus popped up in a Philadelphia store: the marketing idea was to give people the chance to meet Santa Claus live. But how did we get to the Santa Claus we know today? It was the designer Fred Mizen who created the character who became the protagonist of the campaigns of advertising Coca Cola. Before then, in fact, Santa Claus was depicted as an elf, small, thin and green. It was then storytelling of the magic of Christmas night to allow the company to forcefully enter the collective imagination and modifying that legendary figure thanks to its advertising posters.