Starbucks Holiday Cups Through the Years: 30 Seasons, Mostly Red

Starbucks introduced its first holiday cup in 1997, when it had about 1,400 coffeehouses. The designer was Sandy Nelson, then on Starbucks' in-house team, and her design was picked from dozens of concepts, according to the company.

The first holiday cup was not red. Starbucks' history page says it "came in four colors: a deep magenta and three other jewel-tones", and its 2022 retrospective names them as magenta, sapphire, emerald and purple, printed with a linoleum block-style pattern of swirls and holly leaves, "wrapped like a gift". Sources disagree on the shades: a 2015 Starbucks statement described the 1997 cups as deeper reds, greens and blues. The second season, 1998, came in purple hues with swirling snowflakes.

The record for the early cups is thin. ABC7 in San Francisco reported that design files for the first several years were lost in the 2001 earthquake, and no other outlet we found repeats that detail.

In 1999. Starbucks calls that year's cup "the classic candy-apple red Starbucks holiday cup", decorated with black line drawings of snowflakes and stockings. Red was then the main color of every season to 2016: 18 in a row.

The themes changed every year while the color stayed. 2000 was "Coffeetown", a village of coffee pots; 2001 dressed the cup as a present; 2007 had ice skaters on a frozen pond; 2011 a series of three cups with carolers, a skater and a dog sled; 2013 coffee cherries and ornaments "in a deep garnet with touches of gold".

For 11 of those seasons (2000 to 2002, 2004 to 2009, 2011 and 2012) we found a description of the design but not of its color. The red for those years rests on Starbucks' statement that the candy-apple shade "has made its way into each subsequent creation" since 1999. The visual marks those seasons.

For 2015 Starbucks dropped the illustration altogether. The cup was a two-tone ombre, bright poppy red shading into cranberry, with no snowflakes, ornaments or characters. Jeffrey Fields, then Starbucks' vice president of design and content, said the company wanted "a purity of design that welcomes all of our stories".

On 5 November 2015 the evangelist Joshua Feuerstein posted a video saying Starbucks had taken Christmas off its cups. Vox reported it had more than 14 million views by 10 November. Feuerstein asked supporters to give their name as "Merry Christmas" so baristas would have to write and call it out, and #MerryChristmasStarbucks spread. Donald Trump, then a presidential candidate, raised a boycott at a rally on 9 November, then said he did not care.

Vox also pointed out that Starbucks had not printed "Merry Christmas" on its holiday cups in the six years before. The 2015 change was the loss of the pictures, not of a greeting. A counter-hashtag, #ItsJustACup, was reported trending as the row went on.

The year after the backlash, 2016, Starbucks went the other way: 13 red cups with white drawings, all by customers, chosen from more than 1,200 Instagram entries from six countries. A green cup that appeared the same autumn was a separate "unity" design, and Starbucks said it was not a holiday cup.

The first white holiday cup came in 2017: a cup customers could color in themselves, with a drawing of two hands joined by ribbons and splashes of red and green. A red cup with a white heart followed later in the season, so red never left the shelf. In 2018 green joined as a cup color, in a set of four with two red cups, one green and one white.

Since then every season has been a set of four hot-cup designs or colorways, and none has been all one color. 2019 mixed red, white and Starbucks green; 2021 added touches of lilac; 2023 a magenta; and in 2024 Starbucks said it wanted to "lean into greens". In 2025 the four colorways split two red and two green, and in 2026 two red and two white.

The 2026 cups arrived with the holiday menu on 5 November. There are two patterns, Holiday Tree and Holiday Bow, each in a red and a white colorway, so four hot cups in all, plus a cold cup with evergreen boughs and red bows. Starbucks describes the palette as Starbucks green, red and creamy white with retro mint, antique gold and deep cranberry.

A Starbucks spokesperson told TODAY the designs drew on a classic holiday film, "Home Alone". The season also brought Starbucks' first holiday pup cup, a 3.5-ounce cup for dogs.

Red Cup Day 2026 is Tuesday 17 November. Customers who buy a handcrafted holiday drink that day get a collectible reusable red cup at participating stores while supplies last, according to Starbucks.

The giveaway is newer than the red cup. Starbucks dates it to 2018, when the free reusable cup came with the launch on 2 November. 2019 and 2020 were also launch-week days; from 2021 it moved to a Thursday in mid-November: 18 November 2021, 17 November 2022, 16 November 2023, 14 November 2024 and 13 November 2025. 2026 is the first Red Cup Day on a Tuesday.

Since 2022, Starbucks Workers United, the union for baristas at a minority of Starbucks' company-run US stores, has used Red Cup Day for walkouts. Union members and press accounts give the reason as the workload: it is among the busiest days of the year. The union calls the action the "Red Cup Rebellion". Every count below comes from one side of the dispute or a news outlet, and each is labelled.

On 17 November 2022, The Guardian counted 112 stores and about 2,000 workers in 25 states; NPR reported more than 100 stores and more than 1,000 workers. Starbucks gave no count. On 16 November 2023, AP reported more than 200 stores on strike and the union said it expected more than 5,000 workers. Starbucks said nearly 10,000 stores were open.

We found no Red Cup Day strike in 2024. That year's largest action came from 20 to 24 December, a "strike before Christmas" that the union said reached more than 300 stores; Starbucks said about 170 did not open.

On 13 November 2025 the union said more than 1,000 workers at 65 stores in 45 cities walked out, in an open-ended strike over what it calls unfair labor practices. Some summaries give the 65 as cities; AP and ABC News both reported stores. Starbucks said 99% of its stores were open and that the union represents about 4% of its workers. The union's latest figures we found, from 11 December 2025, put the strike at more than 3,800 baristas at more than 180 stores.

There is no official dataset of Starbucks cup colors. We built one row per season from Starbucks' history page, its 2022 25-year retrospective, its yearly announcements and dated news reports. Starbucks' own pages refuse automated reading, so some were read from Internet Archive copies.

Colors are recorded in the sources' words, never read off a photograph. The colors on the visual are our approximations of those words, drawn on a generic cup outline; no Starbucks artwork or logo is reproduced. To see the real designs, Starbucks' holiday cup history page shows them.

"Main color" is our rule: the color of most cups in the season's set. The number of designs is known for 15 seasons and left blank for the rest rather than guessed.