The Groove Issue 14 - How Artists, Marketers and Entrepreneurs Turned Christmas into a Business
Welcome to the fourteenth issue of The Groove.
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HOW ARTISTS, MARKETERS AND ENTREPRENEURS TURNED CHRISTMAS INTO A BUSINESS
As we navigate the strangest Holiday season we’ve ever had, I thought it would be a good time to revisit how artists, marketers, and entrepreneurs played a huge part in the commercialization of Christmas. Well, more than a part - we owe them everything for making these festivities into one of the biggest and most lucrative businesses in history. This is how it was done:
Everyone Likes a Party
French painter Thomas Couture’s rendition of Saturnalia. The Romans in their Decadence (1847) is hanging at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris and looks more like a pool party in Vegas than a Christmas celebration.
It all started with the people of the Roman Empire, who feasted during the mid-winter in a celebration called Saturnalia. Houses were decorated with wreaths of evergreen plants, along with other antecedent customs now associated with Christmas. But after the establishment of the Church, Pope Julius I in the 3rd century AD declared December 25 as the birth of Jesus in an effort to adopt and absorb the traditions of the pagans, rolling Christmas and Saturnalia into one. He knew that if he left the festivities intact but tweaked the reasons of the celebration, he would have a higher chance of signing up new recruits who would party no matter what.
The pope first called it the Feast of the Nativity, then by 432 AD the custom spread to Egypt, and later by the end of the 6th century, to England. Since the pope had given up on dictating the rules about how Christmas was to be celebrated, Christmas spread out in Europe by getting people attend Church, then letting them celebrate in the pagan way by getting drunk in a carnival-like atmosphere not unlike today’s Mardi Gras.
If You Want to Reach Millions, Go for The Visuals
The Adoration of the Magi by Peter Paul Rubens. He first painted it in 1609 and later gave it a major reworking between 1628 and 1629 during his second trip to Spain. It is now in the Museo del Prado in Madr
In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, most commoners in Europe were illiterate. The Church, in its relentless quest to turn everyone into a Christian, knew that asking people to read the New Testament would be a futile exercise. They needed visuals. And what better way to tell the origins of Christianity than through art? The Church, being one of the biggest and most organized marketers of the time, was the greatest patron of the arts and paid top dollar to commission artists to paint narratives that anyone would understand. Of course, the Church’s wish list for each artist was something like this: The light! The drama! The ethereal quality of the portraits! The halos! The supernatural! Make them believe they are seeing God!
That’s how we got some of the most stunning works in history, including Botticelli’s The Cestello Annunciation (1489) commissioned by The Chapel of the Florentine monastery Cestello, and Rubens’s Adoration of the Magi (1609-1610) commissioned by the Antwerp town council. But these are just two among thousands upon thousands of nativity scenes, annunciations, and Christian-origin imagery. The apprentices copied the masters, the not-so-skilled copied the apprentices, and the images started propagating like wildfire everywhere in Europe - planting the seeds of what we now automatically associate with the holidays. For the next two centuries, the party and the imagery kept Christmas alive.
Around the same time, modern Christmas trees made their first appearance in Germany. They were a mix of the Saturnalia wreaths and the ideas of Protestant Christian reformer Martin Luther, who is said to have first added lighted candles to an evergreen tree.
It’s All About Storytelling
Thomas Nast, a 19th century political cartoonist, drew this 1881 image known as “Merry Old Santa Claus”.
Enter the new world, where the colonizers brought their version of Christmas to the Americas, which became a lot more toned down than its European counterpart. In 1819, best-selling author Washington Irving wrote The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, a series of stories about the celebration of Christmas in an English manor house. The sketches feature a squire who invited the peasants into his home for the holiday. In contrast to the problems faced in American society, the two groups mingled effortlessly, and some sort of gift exchange happens from the wealthy to the less fortunate. This book began the dissemination of the idea of generosity and gift-giving around Christmas, and marketers and businesses started to take note.
Later, in 1843, Charles Dickens wrote the classic holiday tale, A Christmas Carol, with a similar message as Irving’s sketches. The importance of charity and goodwill towards all humankind struck a powerful chord in the United States and England, and showed members of Victorian society the benefits of celebrating the holiday.
Mix, Match and Cash Out
Haddon Sundblom’s upgraded version of Santa, commissioned by Coca Cola in 1931
Mingling the imagery from Europe, the pagan parties from the Roman Empire, and the noble ideas from the books by Irving and Dickens, Americans began to embrace Christmas as the perfect family holiday. But more was needed. After all, America was founded on the premise of the new. How to reinvent this holiday to fill the cultural needs of a growing nation? By pulling from customs that existed everywhere and figuring out a way to capitalize on the facts and fantasies that people put together in their heads.
The iconic version of Santa Claus as a happy man in red with a white beard and a sack of toys was immortalized in 1881, when political cartoonist Thomas Nast drew on Episcopal minister Clement Clarke Moore’s Christmas poem called “An Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas,” more popularly known today by its first line: “‘Twas The Night Before Christmas.” The poem depicted Santa Claus as a jolly man who flies from home to home on a sled driven by reindeer to deliver toys.
Through the following years, Santa went through a makeover. We owe Coca Cola for the looks of the plump and rosy dude and also his celebrity status. Their ads featuring the white-haired man first began in 1920 in the Saturday Evening Post. By 1931, a more wholesome Santa was desired. It was then that Coca Cola commissioned an illustrator by the name of Haddon Sundblom to make him friendlier, jollier, and robust. Sundblom delivered, and we got an upgraded version of Santa who appeared in National Geographic, Ladies Home Journal, and The New Yorker, among others. The original artworks are housed in the Coca Cola archives and they have since been exhibited all over the world.
Another entrepreneur and marketer, F.W. Woolworth, first brought glass ornaments from the German cottage industry to the mass market in the US. In 1880, $25 worth of hand-blown glass ornaments were purchased for his variety store in Lancaster, PA – all of which sold within two days. Fast forward to ten years later and more than 200,000 glass ornaments made from more than 6,000 recorded designs, each by individual families, were being imported into the US.
The truth is that Christmas has gone through so many marketing mutations, that people barely remember what is being celebrated. As humans, we love magical thinking, and we are lured by art in all its forms. We like to complete the narrative and create our own interpretations, especially since we are immersed into the story since childhood. This is why Christmas as a business is so attractive - we have to fill in the blanks of an incomplete narrative: Was Jesus born in December? Who were those three wise men? Why is Saint Nicholas also Santa Claus and why does he live in the North Pole? What about the gifts? And all the lights? These questions keep the creative wheel rolling, and the more people who add their own spin to it, the more engaging and lucrative it becomes.
What is undeniable is what made Christmas the massive and enduring enterprise it has been for centuries: shrewd marketing tactics, wise and intuitive entrepreneurs, and mega-skilled artists.
Thank you for reading this far. Wishing you a safe and happy holiday with your loved ones!
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