Santa Claus is a strong brand
By Jarmo Aaltonen
Santa Claus is a brand with roots going back to the Roman Empire, which marketers and others have sought to adopt for themselves.
The archetype for the modern Santa was St. Nicholas, who lived in what is now Turkey in the fourth century. He liked children, and as a shy man he would secretly help neighbours in distress.
The story goes that in order to remain an anonymous benefactor, he dropped a dowry present for the daughter of a poor man through the chimney, and it fell into a sock that was drying there. That is why stockings are still hung on the mantlepiece in the Americas in hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there.
A Santa who comes in secret is not unknown in Finland, either. In the Ostrobothnia region, Santa would not come inside at all, and would just slip presents into a house through the crack in the door.
The original Finnish brand for Santa involved a figure with the horns of a goat and a mask of birch bark, who would go from house to house, frightening the children, in hopes of getting food and drink for Christmas. In the Finnish national pagan Christmas tradition, they would also take liberties with the ladies of the household.
This brand has not completely disappeared: the antics of Finnish Santas are fuelled by more modern alcoholic beverages.
I remember being robbed of my childhood innocence at the age of six: the sharp eye, or was it the nose, of our neighbour, a Mr. Harmaala, who was serving as Santa Claus for our family, spotted my father’s bottle of brandy next to the table. After his visit he quickly removed his Santa costume right outside our house and popped in as himself.
My older brother Hanski took me out to see the pile of clothing to prove to me that a hoax had been perpetrated.
At about the same age, the child star Shirley Temple suffered an even worse case of disillusionment. Her belief in Santa Claus came to an end when a department store Santa asked her for an autograph.
Santa was standardised in the United States in the 1920s, which can be seen as an early case of branding. The brand worked well for Coca-Cola, because the company’s colours were already red and white.
This was the beginning of the decline of the traditional Finnish figure, but we shouldn’t blame the Americans: it’s actually the fault of a Swedish-speaker of Finnish origin. The first Coca-Cola Santa in a red suit was drawn in 1931 by Haddon Sundblom, a native of the Åland Islands. The company turned this overweight ho-ho-ho’er into a global brand in its advertising campaigns in 1931-1964.
The model for Santa was Sundblom’s friend, the retired salesman Lou Prentice, and after his death, the artist himself.
The first red-suited Santa appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in 1931. Until then, Santa’s costume had a colour range from green to blue. These colours can sometimes still be seen in European pictures of Santa.
Americans think that Santa lives at the North Pole, and the Danes feel that Greenland is his home. The Finnish Korvatunturi, or "Ear Mountain", was invented in 1927 by radio journalist Markus Rautio, the producer of a classic children’s radio programme.
The location was appropriate for Santa’s home, because Ear Mountain was a place where Santa could hear the wishes, and gather information about the behaviour, of children all over the world.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 15.12.2004
More on this subject:
 Heavy demand in Brussels for services of Finnish Santa Claus
JARMO AALTONEN / Helsingin Sanomat
jarmo.aaltonen@hs.fi
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