Tag Archives: gold

Colour symbolism at Christmas

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At this time of year my thoughts sometimes turn to the colours that we associate with Christmas: red, green, gold, silver and white, in various combinations. One of the things that I sometimes read about is where Father Christmas always had a red suit or whether he had a green one. I note that in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Santa is wearing a dull brownish tunic.

Father Christmas in Narnia

Though apparently according to CS Lewis himself in the book: on the sledge sat a person everyone knew the moment they set eyes on him. He was a huge man in a bright red robe (bright as hollyberries) with a hood that had fur inside it and a great white beard that fell like a foamy waterfall over his chest.

https://www.thephantastic.com/home/narnia-always-winter-and-never-christmas

There are also annual stories about whether the traditional red we now associate with Father Christmas was influenced by Coca-Cola for marketing reasons. So, today I thought I would share this blog post about the truth of Father Christmas and red. It does refer to Coca-Cola who, I believe, had a role in popularising our current image of Santa but were not actually responsible for the colour change. This view is also reinforced by this blog post about Santa and red.

Anyway, the thing I read today that inspired me to write this post is actually this blog post which is about colour symbolism and Christmas.

Finally, if you want to explore the meanings that colours have in a more academic perspective here is a link to two papers that are free to read in JAIC – the Journal of the International Colour Association. One was written by me and Seahwa Won (who was my PhD student at the time) and you can see that one here. The other is written by José Luis Caivano and Mabel Amanda Lopéz, well known colour experts in Argentina, and you can see that here.

why do we value gold?

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gold

Could we have developed currency around elements other than gold and silver? Why couldn’t we have coins made out of platinum, for example?

Interesting article today on the BBC website interviewing Professor Sella (University Collage London) about why, of the 118 elements of the periodic table, it is gold (alongside silver) that we value and use for currency.

According to Prof Sella there are reasons to dismiss all the elements apart from gold and silver. For example, you couldn’t use elements that are gas (such as neon) or liquid (mercury) as currency because it would be impractical to carry them around. Several others (such as arsenic and the other liquid, bromine) are poisonous and so could not be practically used. The alkaline metals (those on the left-hand side of the periodic table) are not stable enough (they react with too many other elements). And, of course, say no more about the radioactive elements. Some of the so-called rare earths (such as cerium) could be used but they tend to be even more rare that gold and are actually quite difficult to distinguish from each other.

periodic-table

Prof Sella also postulates reasons for dismissing the 40 transition and post-transition elements such as copper, lead, iron and aluminium. Many are hard to smelt (needing temperatures as high as 1000 deg C) such as titanium and zirconium or hard to extract such as aluminium. Iron is easier to extract and smelt but rusts too easily. Iron is also too abundant.

Prof Sella lists the 8 noble metals (platinum, palladium, rhodium, iridium, osmium and ruthenium, gold and silver) as contenders. However, with the exception of silver and gold they are too rare and have other problems (platinum is hard to extract and has a very high melting point for example). So this leaves gold and silver. The choice of these metals is not arbitrary. It turns out that they have exactly the right properties that we need. They are stable, chemically uninteresting, rare (but not too rare), safe, relatively easy to extract, solid at room temperature and with a reasonably low melting temperature.

The article also explains why gold is golden in colour.

yellow line is offensive

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Atlanta’s transit system will rename a train route into the heart of the city’s Asian community in response to complaints that calling it the “yellow line” showed a lack of racial sensitivity. The Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority issued a statement Thursday afternoon announcing it would change the name of the line to the “gold line.”