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.

A medieval inspiration?

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?

A new technology sheds some light

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.

At the bleakest time of year, when most of nature lay dormant, people brought evergreens indoors to brighten their living spaces and remind them of warmer days to come.

Holly, ivy, laurel, mistletoe, rosemary and boughs of fir or pine were popular choices because they were easily accessible. European settlers in North America added local flora like cranberries and smilax to the list. These December plants featured green foliage and red or white berries.

Other symbols that became associated with Christmas during the 19th century also happened to be red. Christmas trees were decorated with edible treats, like nuts, pretzels and bright red apples saved from the fall harvest.

Red-breasted robins, a common sight in British gardens in December when they migrate to the temperate islands from other parts of northern Europe, appeared on newly invented Christmas cards.

Sometimes the birds were shown delivering Christmas greetings in a nod to Victorian letter carriers, who were nicknamed "robins" due to their scarlet uniforms and were ubiquitous during the holiday season, when tens of millions of cards were sent through the British post.

The natural and cultural environment of a Victorian Christmas, then, spotlighted the colours red and green in more ways than one.

But it was a Victorian technology that seems to have clinched their status as the iconic hues of the festive season.

This is a story about gaslighting

Routledge's Christmas Annual for 1869 includes this advice for Christmas decorating: "Viewed aesthetically, all Christmas decorations should be broad in effect and warm in colour. Even in churches there will require some attention to the gaslight effect; and hence there must be some discrimination in the colours used. Nothing is more effective than red and green; for it is Nature's winter fashion — warm, glowing and bright, relieved by natural and sombre half tints."

Not only are red and green decorations conveniently supplied by nature, the book suggests, but they're something else, too: appealing under gaslights.

Gaslighting — the literal kind and not the more modern metaphor for making someone doubt their own perception of reality — became increasingly common in middle-class homes over the course of the 19th century. Though many times brighter than candle flame, this new form of lighting had a warm tint that altered the appearance of certain hues.

The 1881 edition of Hill's Manual of Social and Business Forms reads: "A dress of a colour that may be beautiful during the day, may be lacking in beauty at night, owing to the effect of gaslight.… Pale yellow, which is handsome by day, is muddy in appearance by gaslight. So purple and orange, that harmonize and are beautiful by daylight, lose their charm at night."

Shades of red were almost universally pleasing under gaslight, as was "gaslight green."

Since days are shortest over the winter solstice, most Victorian Christmas celebrations took place after dark. Gift openings were even done on Christmas Eve, rather than Christmas morning, making the appearance of decorations under gaslights a key consideration. Gaslighting may also explain why the Victorians were just as delighted as we are by decor that sparkled, often using homemade recipes to add crystals, crushed glass and gold leaf to their ornaments, since gaslight reflected spectacularly off glitter.

Though gaslights have long since been replaced by electric, they've left an indelible mark on the colours we use to brighten this dark season.

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