The Face Was Lou's
Coke's holiday trucks are back. Coke didn't make Santa red: Puck did, and a rival soda used him first. What Coke had was a painter, a retired salesman for a model, and later a mirror. Lately, AI.
Coca-Cola's holiday trucks are back on the road this month, the red ones with Santa painted on the side, and with them comes the most repeated Christmas fact on the internet: Coke invented the red Santa, and he's red because the cans are. Coca-Cola's own history page says no. "Santa appeared in a red coat before Sundblom painted him."
He was already red on the covers of Puck, the New York humor magazine, at the start of the century. The 1904 one has him asleep in the back of a motor car in the full outfit, white fur trim included. Nobody in that picture is drinking anything.
He was also already selling soda. White Rock, a mineral water and ginger ale company from Wisconsin, used Santa to sell mineral water in 1915 and ginger ale in 1923, in color, in Life. White Rock is still around, and it still minds. Its website has a post about this titled "Ho Ho Ho - Setting the Facts Straight!" It opens: "This myth is hard to kill!!!!" Four exclamation marks. "White Rock bests Coke by 15 years!"
Coke's Santa arrived in 1931, in the Saturday Evening Post. Archie Lee, the D'Arcy agency man on the account, wanted a wholesome one, and the illustrator Haddon Sundblom went back to Clement Clarke Moore's 1823 poem, "A Visit from St. Nicholas," for the details: warm, chubby, human. Sundblom painted him every year until 1964. What Coke actually did was repeat the same Santa for thirty-three Christmases, until everyone forgot there had been any other.
And Sundblom didn't make the face up either. He painted it from a live model, his friend Lou Prentiss, a retired salesman. When Prentiss died, Sundblom used himself, painting while looking into a mirror.
In 2024 Coca-Cola remade its 1995 "Holidays Are Coming" truck ad, the one with real actors and real trucks, using generative AI: three AI studios, four AI models, per Forbes via NBC. People online called it "soulless." In 2025 it did it again, and this time went light on the humans: polar bears, rabbits and sloths watching the trucks go by.
The red was never Coke's. The face was Lou's.