Saying that Coca-Cola created the present-day Santa Claus for its advertisements, anti-Santa campaigners in Austria and Germany are fighting the commercialization of Christmas by asking vendors to ban him from their markets.

The campaigners were able to persuade a market is in front of the Vienna city hall - the biggest Christmas market in the country - to ban Santa's image. Now the only Santa to be seen is the one in the middle of occasional "Ban Santa" stickers.

Anti-Santa campaigners said Santa Claus detracts from the true meaning of the Yuletide season.

"Our shopping centers want to make money, and they have a right to make money, we have no problem with that," Duestsche Welle quotes Reverend Volker Faigle, a Lutheran pastor, as saying.

"But if you already start the season in September, people think Christmas is just about shopping, shopping, shopping. Then we think Christmas is misused."

A spokesman for the Vienna city hall confirmed the ban: "There are rules governing what stall holders can do, and one of them is to agree not to use the image of Santa as a condition of being able to trade there.

"Santa is an English-language creation. People who want to see him should go to America, where I am sure Coca-Cola will be happy to oblige."

The ban in Vienna has been duplicated in other Christmas markets across Austria and Germany where St. Nicholas is regarded as the traditional bearer of Yuletide gifts.

Bettina Schade, from the Frankfurter Nicholas Initiative in Germany, said, "We object to the material things, the hectic rush to buy gifts, and the ubiquity of the bearded man in the red suit that are taking away from the core meaning of Christmas.

"The Christian origins of Christmas, like the birth of Jesus, have receded into the background. It's becoming more and more a festival that is reduced to simply worldly gifts and commerce."