Why Are Christmas Colors Red, Green, and White?

Pagan Winter Traditions

Holly plants, with their lush green leaves and vibrant red berries, are widely associated with Christmas and winter in general (at least in the Northern Hemisphere). That connection can be traced to ancient times, when pagan tribes such as the Celts revered holly as a sign of Earth’s perpetual beauty.

While deciduous trees shed their leaves by the winter solstice, holly is evergreen, maintaining its foliage and berries year-round, and so it was a symbol of prosperity during pagan wintertime festivals. 

Furthermore, ancient pagan societies such as the Celts, Norse, and Romans harvested holly and brought it inside their homes to incorporate some warmth and life during the dead of winter. Those pagan rituals date back millennia and predate the early growth of Christianity throughout the start of the first millennium CE. Some even believed holly protected against evil spirits and so hung the plant on doors to safeguard the home’s occupants — similar to how we hang wreaths on our front doors today.

Pagan societies have been celebrating the winter solstice since the Neolithic Age ( around 10,000 BCE), so these traditions existed long before the earliest known Christmas celebration, which was recorded in 354 CE. But as Christianity expanded in the early part of the first millennium, Christians adopted many pagan traditions, including adorning their homes with holly during wintertime celebrations. This helped establish a connection between Christmas and the colors red and green.

The color white’s association with these winter celebrations is simple: It’s the color of snow. Blankets of snow would often coat the ground around the winter solstice, and this natural combination of red-and-green holly and white snow helped lay the foundation for our modern Christmas color scheme.

Christian Symbolism

As the Christian religion began to be formed in the first century CE, it adopted many familiar stylistic elements from paganism in a strategic decision meant to make their new belief system more accessible to converts. Symbols and hues that held deep significance in pagan culture — such as the colors red, green, and white — came to possess symbolic importance in the Christian religion as well.

In the wake of that artistic assimilation, it was common to see those deeply meaningful colors appear in depictions of Jesus Christ — the holiest figure in Christianity for whom the holiday of Christmas is named. Many practitioners believe red symbolizes the blood of Christ at his crucifixion, while green represents the crown of thorns that Jesus wore. Green is also said to symbolize Christ’s rebirth and eternal life, much like how green deciduous plants undergo a “rebirth” each spring. 

Meanwhile, white traditionally stands for purity and hope — traits often associated with Jesus and his mother Mary. Given the strong symbolic connection between those colors and Jesus Christ — as well as the fact those hues had been associated with winter holidays since the time of the pagans — they became tied to the Christmas holiday as it took off from the mid-fourth century onward.

Red and green are also associated with Christianity due to rood screens, an architectural element found in many medieval churches. These wood-and-stone screens were often used to separate the area around the altar from the area where the congregation sits, and were traditionally painted red and green.

One theory is that these were simply the most readily available paint colors: Red pigments came from iron while green came from copper, both of which were common metals in the Middle Ages. Others posit the color choice had a symbolic meaning in the medieval era that’s been lost to time, while some suggest the colors were inspired by ancient pagan celebrations. 

Romanticizing a “White Christmas”

Snow has long been a quintessential part of winter in much of the world, but the concept of a “white Christmas” was glamorized by various works of art in the 19th and 20th centuries. One such example is the 1822 poem “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” which painted the idyllic picture of pristine white snow falling on Christmas Eve. 

This concept was further romanticized by the New York-based printmaker Currier and Ives. Starting in 1857, the printer released a series of highly popular prints depicting snowy wintertime and Christmas scenes. Then in 1941, Bing Crosby hammered the image home when he first crooned the song “White Christmas.”

Coca-Cola’s Santa Claus

Part of the reason the colors red and white are so heavily associated with Christmas is — as you may have guessed — because they’re the colors worn by Santa Claus. However, that wasn’t always the case. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, Santa was occasionally shown wearing red, but he was also depicted in various other shades ranging from blue to yellow.

That all changed in 1931, when Coca-Cola hired an artist named Haddon Sundblum to draw Santa for a new advertising campaign. Unlike earlier depictions of Santa, some of which portrayed St. Nick as thin and elf-like, Sundblum conceived of the large, jolly Santa we know today. He also drew Santa dressed in a red-and-white outfit and boasting a bushy white beard. Of course, those hues weren’t chosen by coincidence; they were the colors from Coca-Cola’s logo.

Those ads proved extremely popular in the United States and became widely known in other parts of the world as well. This widespread recognition gave rise to the image of Santa Claus we know today, helping solidify the connection between Christmas and its iconic color scheme.