IF YOU CALLED UP one of the three trillion Christmas-related Web sites on the Internet this year, chances are you saw banners reading, "Santa is looking for a new business partner." How original, you thought, enlisting St. Nick to advertise for capital investment. But during the past few years -- which saw Santa demoted from Coca-Cola’s chief Yuletime spokesperson in favor of a pack of computer-animated polar bears -- the old man has been taking whatever he can get.

Of course, Santa has long been a commercial figure. The red-suited, gift-giving personification of jolly capitalism we know today was not just employed by Coca-Cola -- he was invented by it. In 1931, the company, having been forced twenty-eight years earlier to remove a certain addictive substance from its product, was searching for ways to up soft-drink consumption during the long cold months of winter. A number of artists received commissions to come up with a character to push the product. The winner was Swedish painter Haddon Sundblom, a Nordic equivalent of Norman Rockwell who came up with the Claus we know today.

Sundblom himself lifted the figure from Thomas Nash’s nineteenth-century illustrations for Clement C. Moore’s ’Twas the Night Before Christmas. Nash’s Nick was a chubby fellow in a belted woolen suit with what looked like a GI knapsack upon his back. Sundblom changed the coat  to a bright scarlet, which was fine by his employers, who promptly patented the color Coca-Cola Red. For sixty-odd years, Sundblom’s Santa was a fixture in Coke’s Christmas campaign: Everyone over the age of twenty remembers ads in which the overworked (and often sweaty) philanthropist paused for a refreshing caffeine fix before continuing on his appointed rounds. No one stopped to consider how many rest stops he had to make along the way, or how wired he must have been at the end of his journey.

This, however, was traditional advertising, inspired by the belief that people needed to have their hearts warmed while spending their money.  Now that consumers acknowledge that spending -- like keeping the kids’ mouths shut -- is an end unto itself, admakers have dropped the homespun look. There’s no heartwarming legend behind the polar bears quenching their Arctic thirst. There’s no need for one. Today we buy Coke whenever we feel like it, simply because we feel like it. "What’s the point of denying  yourself something just because you don’t  know why you should want it?" these ads say.  "Why shouldn’t polar bears drink Coke?"

Recently, underground artists in Germany took Sundblom's figure and brought this implicit hedonism to the surface. Santa’s chubby cheeks are dyed Grinch green,  his pipe is replaced by a spliff, and his skin is pockmarked, Dorian Gray-style, with the wear and tear of decadence and depravity.  Oddly enough,  this "Evil Santa" harkens back to the initial legends that eventually congealed into a  single Christmas myth; the goat-headed satyr, say, that presided over the Nordic festival of Yul. After all, if Christmas evolved as a replacement for various pagan celebrations of the solstice,  doesn't it make sense to  reacquaint Santa -- and ourselves – with the holiday's  hard-partying, heathen history?

And who's to say that a hard-rocking Santa would be worse than the Saint of the Hard Sell we're stuck with nowadays? Aside from  Mardi Gras, no American holiday unleashes the collective id the way Brazil's Carnaval, or Berlin's Love Parade does. In those festivals, the public takes a vacation from social constraints and indulges every whim -- or at least more whims than the perennially stressed-out, Coke-drinking Christmas shoppers in the States ever recognize.  The real problem with today’s American-style Christmas is not that it’s commercial, but that it’s a wan enactment of eternal human desires, which are given free rein elsewhere. But just as there are better things to drink than Coke, there are better ways to achieve instant gratification than spending your money at the mall: If we can live without the treacle of the original Coke  campaign, maybe it's time to turn Christmas itself into the slamming party it was meant to be.