No, Virginia, Santa Claus was not invented by the Coca-Cola Co.

The contention that Coke created the modern image of Santa and decked him out in corporate red has become something of an urban myth in recent years. Just the other day, the BBC phoned Coca-Cola archivist Phil Mooney and put him on the radio to address the issue.

Courtesy of Coca-Cola (ENLARGE)

One of Haddon Sundblom's Santa renderings.

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"I've heard more questions about it in the last five years than I ever did before," Mooney says. "I think it's the Internet."

His response is that a red-clad Santa actually dates to the 1800s, when illustrator Thomas Nast depicted him that way in Harper's Weekly and the first American Christmas cards showed him in crimson.

That's not to say, thought, that Coke didn't change the way Americans envision Santa.

The classic Koke Kringle appeared in 42 ads that ran on billboards and in magazines like National Geographic from 1931 to 1964. Artist Haddon Sundblom painted him as a jovial, rotund, ruddy-cheeked fellow who bears some resemblance to a later creation of his, the Quaker Oats man.

By comparison, many 19th-century Santas looked lean and rather dour. And some of them, it's true, wore green and other colors.

The red outfit has provided fodder for conspiracy theorists.

"He wears the corporate colors ... for a reason," charged James B. Twitchell in his book "Twenty Ads That Shook the World." "He is working out of Atlanta, not out of the North Pole."

Archivist Mooney is adamant: "The fact that red was our corporate color was just a happy coincidence."

Snopes.com — a Web site that debunks urban myths — sides with the Coke archivist.

But there is one bit of intrigue associated with Coke and its thirsty elf. Call it the mystery of the missing Santas.

The company owns 35 of Sundblom's Santa oil paintings and displays a dozen of them in the new World of Coca-Cola museum in downtown Atlanta. But Mooney was unable to locate two of the paintings until a few years ago when he sent some others out to be cleaned by an art restoration house. Sundblom, it seems, had painted new Santas over two of the originals.

"It was the Depression, and these illustrators were too cheap to buy new canvas," Mooney says.

Those painted-over Santas may be the only ones in Coke's portfolio who aren't wearing red.