Red and green with a bit of literal gaslighting: The story of our Christmas colours

Christmas is upon us, and homes across the country are decked out in holiday hues of red and green.

But how did these complementary colours become so synonymous with the holiday?

One popular belief is that Coca-Cola popularized the dichromatic Christmas colour scheme with an iconic advertising campaign. In 1931, Coca-Cola hired Michigan-born artist Haddon Sundblom to illustrate a series of magazine ads the company planned to run over the festive season.

Sundblom's painting of a rosy-cheeked Santa Claus, garbed in brand-appropriate red on a green background and raising a glass of cola, was an instant smash hit.

After that first success, Coke commissioned Sundblom to create new Santa ads annually until 1964 and featured Sundblom-inspired Santas in their seasonal campaigns for decades to follow.

Sundblom's paintings helped solidify our popular image of Santa Claus, but red and green were emblematic of Christmas long before Sundblom put brush to canvas.

An 1896 article in the Indianapolis Journal, for instance, notes that "the Christmas colours, red and green, prevailed" in the decor of a December debutante ball.

Like so many other modern Yuletide traditions, the red and green palette seems to have become established over the course of the Victorian period.

Spike Bucklow, former professor of material culture at the University of Cambridge, has a hypothesis for why that might have been the case.

In 19th-century England, there was a surge of interest in reviving historic church architecture, and medieval rood screens that had been damaged or defaced after the reformation were cleaned and restored. These screens, which separated the congregation in the nave from the clergy in the chancel, were typically painted in shades of red and green, a colour combination that, according to Bucklow, symbolized a boundary.

In the church, this was a physical and spiritual boundary between the mundane and the divine, but Bucklow believes the Victorians adopted the colour scheme to mark a temporal boundary between the end of one year and the beginning of the next at Christmastime.

"Our comparatively recent obsession with associating these colours with Christmas," says Bucklow, "masks a profound and long-forgotten other history."

Bucklow's theory, though, raises more questions than it answers. Even if red and green really did represent a boundary in the rood screens, who decided this symbolism should apply to Christmas, too? And how did they promote the idea when most surviving rood screens are concentrated in a small corner of eastern England?

Although red and green became inextricably linked with Christmas during the Victorian period, those colours had already been naturally present in European midwinter decor for centuries.