By now most people know about the flap over FOX News person Megyn Kelly’s absurd remarks concerning the ethnicity of (a) Santa Claus and (b) Jesus. Actions within the DMZ of the annual War On Christmas have reached new levels of ridiculous.
I wasn’t going to say anything about this, but…
Santa Claus is white? Really? After all this time, we’re going to have that debate?
If you must know, Santa Clause is your favorite uncle dressing up in a red suit and bellowing joyously at a key moment in your life. What color is he? What nationality? Whatever you answer, then you know what color Santa Claus is.
Santa Claus is not St. Nicholas. Not because an argument cannot be made that the legends of St. Nikolaos of Myra (or Bari, depending which one prefers) can’t be construed as the model for the modern Saint Nick, Sinterklaas, aka Santa Claus, but because Santa Claus, culturally, is something else altogether by dint of centuries of “drift” and the compiling of other attributes of distinctly non-Christian provenance.  Like Christmas itself, the two long ago became Something Else. (The modern Santa Claus is more descended from pre-Christian Germanic Odin than anything Christian. Christmas itself, as we practice is, is from the Yule celebrations of the same pagan tradition.)
Jesus…well, really, does this actually need explaining?
But the question is, does all this constitute any kind of “War On Christmas”? I don’t see Christmas suffering a bit. It is now as has been since I can remember a time of family, of friends, of fellowfeeling, of charity, corny music, decorations, and the setting aside for a day, a week, a month of petty differences to embrace one another. I haven’t seen much evidence that we’re doing any less of this than ever before.
What there is some struggle over is the idea that some people have it wrong and that those who think they have it right have some kind of obligation to shame the rest of us into accepting their version above any other. Failing that, they then take it upon themselves to take our indifference to their dogmatic myopia as evidence of a war on Christmas and launch a counterattack by pissing and moaning about…
Well, frankly, about style. As far as I can tell, they don’t like what other people’s Christmas looks like. For one, we seem to have these other traditions all mingled in—Hannukah and Kwanza—distorting and “sullying” their vision, as if it’s all some kind of banquet hall and they object to the decorations.
I suppose what really bothers me this time is the flat out racism in evidence. Santa Claus is white, get over it. Jesus is white, historical fact, too bad about all you other people who think it might be otherwise.
Seriously?
Let me ask, in all seriousness, what color is the human heart? I don’t mean the muscle, I mean the essence of our sentiment. What color is that? Because I was raised to believe that both Santa Claus and Jesus were all about the human heart, about healing it, about nurturing it, about celebrating it, which makes it an essential aspect of our commonality. After discarding much of the silliness of both icons, I still find inspiration and succor in that basic truth. I think that part is a good idea and how it is celebrated is irrelevant alongside the idea that it is celebrated.
And that has no color. No ethnicity. No politics, no religion, no ideology. Just you and me and who we love and who we wish to love and the desire that love be the universal attribute by which we know ourselves.
So if there’s a war on Christmas, it is being prosecuted by those who keep insisting that there can be only one way to celebrate it. Such people are truly small of spirit, and now it appears they’re bigoted as well.
Which is really sad. Look at the opportunity being passed up in this, of getting outside your tiny enclave of conspiracy-driven paranoia and siege mentality and finding out that maybe those people down the street you’re not sure about are really kind of cool and interesting. Being so publicly obsessed withe tropes instead of getting down with the True Meaning of the Holiday is just dumb and more than a little hateful.
Christmas is what we make it, out of the feelings of sharing and discovery and renewal. It’s about being open and forgiving and generous and for one day out of the year setting aside differences and realizing that, in a very basic way, there aren’t any. It’s about letting in the idea that we can be better together than alone and that shared joy multiplies and that there ought to be no limits on that. It’s a Technicolor time.
It shouldn’t be whitewashed.
I couldn’t agree more. I must qualify what I say with the disclosure that I am an agnostic, but that I was raised in a protestant home and had instilled in me the traditions that come with that.
There is such an issue right now with what we heathens would call “Christian privilege.” So many all-American, corn-fed, blond-haired, blue-eyed Christians feel the need to go up in arms every time someone has the audacity to cross their path. Heaven forbid anyone question the great truths they feel necessary to impose upon the rest of the country. God help the poor soul who suggests that perhaps Jesus might have had dark skin–or that Santa might be imagined differently than he is in their minds’ eyes. It’s just sad. Isn’t there more important news to be reporting, or has Fox run out of demons to exhume for the moment?
Christmas should be the one time that we try harder than any other time to be our best selves to others, and then it should be the time we use as a template to guide the way we act the rest of the year.
I mean, we should be as excellent as we can to each other all the time, but we only really seem to be any sort of deliberate about it at one time of the year.
The way FOXNewsies are hung up on the ‘whiteness’ of Santa and that they feel it needs to be an issue year in and year out speak loud volumes about their character and poverty of spirit.