A Blank Canvas
Starbucks' holiday cups are back and Red Cup Day is next Tuesday. The cup has never carried a Christian symbol. In 2015 it was still accused of a war on Christmas.
Eleven years ago tonight, at a rally in Springfield, Illinois, Donald Trump brought up a coffee cup. "Maybe we should boycott Starbucks," he said. "I don't know." The problem with the cup was that it was plain red (CBS News has the clip).
Starbucks started doing holiday cups in 1997, and the first ones weren't red. Sandy Nelson, a designer there, made them look like jazzy gift wrap, holly leaves and coffee beans in swirls, in jewel tones: magenta, sapphire, emerald, amethyst. 1998 was burgundy. Red arrived in 1999 and stayed. After that came snowflakes, ornaments, skaters, doves and the word Joy. Never a Christian symbol. Starbucks lost the design files for the early cups in the 2001 earthquake, and when the company wanted its archive back for the 20th anniversary, it was Nelson who had a set of the old cups at home.
In 2015 Starbucks took the drawings off. Two shades of red, the logo, nothing else. Jeffrey Fields, its vice president of design, wrote that the company wanted "a purity of design that welcomes all of our stories," a cup that "mimics a blank canvas" (Fortune). The 2014 cup had been almost as plain, a pine tree in a darker red, and nobody minded.
On November 5, an Arizona evangelist named Joshua Feuerstein posted a video calling the new cup anti-Christian. His plan: tell the barista your name is "Merry Christmas," so they'd have to write it on the cup and call it out. The video passed 12 million views in a few days. Trump picked it up four days later. The blank canvas worked, just not the way Fields meant: people wrote on it, under #MerryChristmasStarbucks, and other people answered with #ItsJustACup.
Fans had been counting down to the cups' launch day, Red Cup Day, for years. In 2018 Starbucks made it a giveaway: anyone who buys a holiday drink gets a free reusable red cup. It's one of the busiest days a store has all year, which is exactly why Starbucks Workers United picked it. On Red Cup Day 2022, baristas at more than 100 stores walked out (Axios). In 2023, 200 stores. In 2025 they started an open-ended strike on Red Cup Day that the union says grew to about 4,500 baristas in more than 130 cities, the longest in the company's history (its own timeline; Labor Notes counted 3,000 in 100). The union calls it the Red Cup Rebellion.
The union has been trying to get a first contract since late 2021. It represents about 12,000 baristas at some 700 stores, fewer than 5 percent of Starbucks' 16,000 in the US. In August it asked other organizations to boycott the chain until Starbucks signs one, and the AFL-CIO signed on (Labor Notes).
This year's Red Cup Day is next Tuesday, November 17. Same deal: buy a holiday drink, get the cup. Starbucks already told us what it wanted that cup to be. Something that welcomes all of our stories.