Why does santa wears red

Prof Joel Waldfogel, an economist and author of Scroogenomics, has been able to track the impact of Santa on the US economy back across the decades.

By comparing retail sales in December with sales in November and January, Prof Waldfogel has estimated the size of the Christmas spending bump all the way back to , the era of the Coca-Cola Santa. In fact, relative to the size of the economy, Christmas spending was three times bigger then than now. What is an everyday indulgence today would have been a once-a-year treat back in the s. Prof Waldfogel has also compared the US Christmas boom to other high-income countries around the world. Again, perhaps surprisingly, the US's December spending boom is not particularly large, relative to other countries.

You can find more information about the programme's sources and listen online or subscribe to the programme podcast. In the grand scheme of things, Christmas is a modest affair, financially speaking. After all, you would have lunch anyway, pay your rent, fill your car with petrol and buy clothes to wear. However, for certain retail sectors - notably jewellery, department stores, electronics, and useless tat - Christmas is a very big deal indeed.

Economists and moralisers do not often find themselves having common cause, but on the subject of Christmas we do: we agree that a lot of Christmas spending is wasteful. Time, energy and natural resources are poured into creating Christmas gifts which the recipients often do not much like. Santa's gifts rarely miss the mark; he is, after all, the world's number one toy expert. The same cannot be said of the rest of us. Prof Waldfogel's most famous academic paper The Deadweight Loss of Christmas tried to measure the gap between how much various Christmas gifts had cost, and how much the recipients valued them - beyond the warm glow of "the thought that counts".

This wastage figure seems to be fairly robust across countries. To put it into context, that is about what the World Bank lends to developing country governments each year. And that is before pondering the strain put on the economy by squeezing the retail spending together in a single month rather than spreading it out - and the time and aggravation devoted to the process of shopping, which is not always pleasant during the December rush. So other economists have examined alternatives to clumsy gift giving.

Gift cards and vouchers do not help as much as one might hope: they are often unredeemed, or resold online at a discount. If you must buy a gift card, note that vouchers for lingerie sell well below face value on eBay, but vouchers for office supplies and coffee hold up pretty well.

Wishlists fare better. Research suggests that recipients are generally delighted to receive an item they have already specified. Givers may be deceiving themselves to think an off-piste gift will be more welcome.

Santa Claus relies on a polite wishlist from good children. The definitive image of the red-robed one was, however, the product of hard-nosed commercialism. They used Santa imagery throughout the s, but only in did they produce an ad the public really warmed to when they commissioned a painting by Haddon Sundblom, an American artist of Swedish and Finnish heritage many of the Americans responsible for creating the modern Santa have roots in the Europe of St Nicholas.

Sundblom conjured up an idealised Santa — vast of stomach, red of face, with little round spectacles; so perpetually jolly and grinning that it must have been exhausting for the old fellow.

Traditional ecclesiastical practices may be strong, but they are no match for Madison Avenue. This article is more than 3 years old. Stephen Moss. Our writers answer some of the commonest queries.

Participants dressed in Father Christmas costumes take part in the traditional Santa Claus run in Michendorf, eastern Germany. Rather than using all the money for his own pleasure and enjoyment, he used much of it to help the poor people. They would receive secret gifts from him, and he was eventually made a saint because of his generosity. When it comes to why Santa is really red, historians have taken a look at the clothing of saints during the early centuries.

Saint Nicholas lived during the 4 th century — a time when their robes were red and white. Nicholas is thought to have worn red and white attire, which could possibly be one of the reasons why our modernised Father Christmas wears those colors.

Beginning in the 16 th century, Father Christmas was introduced to the UK and was the Santa-figure of the Christmas season. Like Saint Nicholas, he was a character filled with cheer, goodwill and gifts for everybody to enjoy.

However, Father Christmas wore green rather than red, supposedly to symbolise the coming of spring.