A few weeks ago I posted an article about the role of sports in pipe and tobacco advertising. I found a lot of fairly entertaining and interesting advertisements from an era when mainstream social attitudes toward smoking were a bit different than they are today and when advertising had a very different style than what we are used to seeing in 2019.
As we find ourselves in the holiday season between Thanksgiving and Christmas it's hard not to notice the role of advertising in our lives. Gift giving, shopping, and travel have become a big part of holiday tradition in the US, and many other places, and advertisers have been tapping in to the "holiday spirit" for many decades to sell every product under the sun. Some of our most memorable seasonal characters have been strongly influence by or created by advertising campaigns.
Famously, the most popular version of Santa Claus for the past 90 years was popularized by a Coca-Cola ad campaign in the early 1930s. Continuing the theme from the last post, here are some Christmas advertisements for pipes and pipe tobacco from that same bygone era. For some, these ads will be nostalgic and for others I hope it is an interesting glimpse into how some small part of the holiday season looked for previous generations.
