What Keeps the Fat Man Flying

As a kid I spent real mental energy on the logistics of Christmas Eve. Not the presents—the route. One night, every child in the world, a single man and a sleigh. The math doesn’t work. You know it doesn’t work. And yet the story holds together because nobody’s checking the math; they’re accepting the premise. Which is, when you think about it, also how advertising works.

Coca-Cola didn’t invent Santa Claus, but they did a thorough job of standardizing him. The red suit, the white beard, the round jolly body—all of it got crystallized through decades of Christmas campaigns into something that feels ancient but is really just very good branding. Santa became the mascot of a soft drink, and somewhere along the way everyone forgot. Now every cola brand wants a piece of that association, which means every December you get a new version of the same joke: Santa drinks our thing. That’s how he does it. Mystery solved.

The real question isn’t what Santa drinks. It’s why we need a story about it at all. Caffeine doesn’t actually explain a one-night global delivery operation. But it makes the world feel more comprehensible than it is, which might be exactly what December is for.