It’s not just the coke in his right hand that makes Santa Claus so merry. It’s the whip in his left! Somebody has been very naughty, and Santa is going to remonstrate with her, very very personally:
This is a very old (you can tell by the tiny glass) Coca Cola advertising image painted by Haddon Sundblom.
Update: A sharp-eyed friend noticed that the photoshopped version has a bust of Stalin that’s not visible in the “real” version. He attributed the addition of the bust to our kinky photoshopper, but something about the brush strokes in the “real” version made me suspicious that this was actually some of that genuine old-fashioned Soviet political correctness in action. And sure enough! There’s no bust of Stalin in the image as it exists currently in the Ukrainian National Museum of Art, but it’s clearly to be seen in many reproductions prior to 1958. Compare and contrast the two postcard versions here (from 1954 and 1958). While searching this out, I was amused to discover a page in which the author muses (I think) about his adolescent fantasies inspired by this artwork:
…то стоит заметить, что в пуританской атмосфере сталинской России можно было возбудиться от совершенно невинного соцреалистического полотна под названием “Прием в комсомол”, широко репродуцируемого и украшавшего чуть ли не каждую классную комнату. Среди персонажей на этой картине была молодая блондинка, которая сидела, закинув ногу на ногу так, что заголились пять-шесть сантиметров ляжки. И не столько сама эта ляжка, сколько контраст ее с темно-коричневым платьем сводил меня с ума и преследовал в сновидениях.
My best machine-assisted translation (not so good) gives us something like this:
…it is worth noting that in the Puritan atmosphere of Stalinist Russia one could become aroused from a perfectly innocent Socialist Realist painting entitled “Admission to the Komsomol,” widely reproducible and decorating almost every classroom. Among the characters in this picture was a young blonde who was sitting with her legs crossed and showing five or six centimeters of her thighs. And this — not so much the thigh as its contrast with the dark brown dress — drove me crazy and chased me in my dreams.
Source is this tweet by Johan Oosterman, a professor of medieval and early modern literature at Radboud University in The Netherlands. His caption: “Times changed: corporal punishment was fun for the bystanders in sixteenth century Flanders. CambraiBM125-128”
For sins of the flesh, sometimes even the most pious nun must submit to the discipline of her order, and bare her bottom for chastisement by her superiors:
It’s a little unclear because the scene is dynamic, but this movie screencap on Bondage Blog looks like the rarely-seen “rubber hose used as a whip” scenario.