Last week, I was visiting with two of my very young nieces, Bella and Tiffany (not their real names), seven and five (very nearly six), respectively. Tiffany tugged at my shirt sleeve as she told me that Santa had visited their school just that previous Friday. Her eyes flickered as she smiled.
Bella, barely two inches taller and standing right behind Tiffany, frowned over the crown of her sister’s head. “It wasn’t the real Santa.” She lodged her mouth into the corner of her cheek like an arrow.
“No?” I asked.
She shook her head. “It was just a guy.” She waved her hand off as though at something in the distance.
I looked at her, at Tiffany, and back at Bella again. I didn’t know quite what I wanted to say, but it was my turn to say something. What came out was, “Well, you know, a person can’t be at more than one place at one time.”
“I sat on his lap,” Tiffany said, sparkling. Bella began to lose interest and wandered over to fiddle with playthings. “Did you tell him what you wanted for Christmas?” I asked Tiffany, and she nodded.
Five is such an eager age.
That night I needed to reflect, because my answer, I realized, puzzled me. I didn’t know why I said just that thing. I didn’t know why I didn’t either continue on with what Bella began (to disclaim Santa altogether), or to actively play along with the Santa myth (which I’ve never done with them, so I’d feel weird starting up all of a sudden). I chose a noncommittal middle ground that didn’t even satisfy me as a response.
Personally, I don’t have anything invested in the Santa story; I don’t remember when I was disabused of the tale as a child. As for Christmas, we had a tree through all of my young childhood, but my father was just never that much of a traditionalist and stopped buying the festive symbol as soon as he feasibly could. I don’t have anything to win or lose by perpetuating the myth amongst my small family members. So why didn’t I say anything one way or the other? Why was I Switzerland?
I thought about Christmas some more.
Remember this blast from the past?
Eight years ago, Megyn Kelly, in case it has slipped your mind or you avoided the story until now, said flatly that Santa was White. (Jesus, too, was White, he just was. I might treat that statement, too, at some later date, but I want to focus on the Santa remarks for now.) Aisha Harris (now at the New York Times, then of Slate.com) had written a piece that suggested we consider the idea of a Black Santa, and Kelly was having no part in that discussion at all.
Why would she say that, and with such certainty?
A hypothesis struck me. Maybe it’s because the Santa myth recalls another cultural myth, and that similarity might just be too taboo or provocative to even utter, let alone advance. This is a hunch, not a theory; I have just begun to do any hard research into this idea. But the idea has stuck with me for over a week. It’s a real idea to me, not just a random flight of fancy:
The spirit of Christmas is whiteness.
Why was Kelly so offended that Smith wanted Americans to imagine a Black Santa? Because Santa embodies only good traits. As an ethnocentric symbol, as a figure of pure goodness and benevolence, it would not be in keeping to have that symbol no longer be White, because as a symbol of the ethnocentric in-group he represents and reflects the goodness and the benevolence of White society as a whole. Can’t be Black: the symbol stops working.
Now, we’re talking about American Santa, not the image of or reference to the Irish saint. In the United States, the Puritans outlawed Christmas celebrations; even when the laws were rescinded, the social proscription against celebrating the holiday remained strong in colonial times, especially in the North. As time went on, the South began to revive the old Christmas traditions, the ones the pinched religionists from the North had considered to be too closely related to pagan rituals in origin (see Saturnalia, Yule, and related celebrations) and to Catholicism in general. American Santa did not make its appearance, at least not as a visual symbol, until the 1800s.
Christmas slowly spread through the United States as the nineteenth century progressed. Thomas Nast bolstered support for the holiday, with his highly regarded illustrations depicting the icon for a popular audience as they took in the newly printed poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (what we now know as “The Night Before Christmas”). Following the Civil War, among the push to mend the ties broken by the two sides, the North began to incorporate Christmas into its seasonal celebrations more consciously as a method of knitting the country back together. In the summer of 1870, President Grant officially designated Christmas as a federal holiday.
Reconstruction came to a close in the aftermath of the election of 1876. For the next twenty years, the Lost Cause became an exportable commodity for the South in terms of literature and other media; civic groups known as ladies’ memorial associations were instrumental in propagating and perpetuating the revisionist history, contributing namely many of those imposing bronze military statues (figures that in our own times have seen removal from public squares).
It’s my educated guess that these groups, maybe specifically the Temperance movement and those associated societies in the South, helped push the drive for adopting Christmas as a federal holiday. The Temperance movement faced significant headway in terms of making inroads in the South—that is, prior to the Civil War; many people in the region saw temperance and abolition originally as one threat. With abolition no longer a question, temperance was able to gain a foothold, especially after Reconstruction began to disintegrate. This mirrored the rise of Protestant Christian fundamentalism in the South.
By 1899, the Southern states had figured out how to craft law to evade the Constitution so as to deprive Black Americans of the right to vote, just decades after the Civil War had seen the South surrender. That era is known as the nadir of American race relations.
The Santa myth is a literal conspiracy. You have people Who Know the secret, and you have people, in this case mostly children, who don’t. The ones Who Know go out of their way to perpetuate the idea that Santa really does exist; hangers-on (like me?) know the secret but don’t disclose it to others, on general principle. It’s kind of cultural peer pressure, now that I think about it, but that’s neither here nor there, I guess.
White privilege is said not to exist; the White people we all suspect of participating in the creation and recreation of that translucent system absolutely deny that anything like that exists. It’s crazy that the rest of us would even put it out there that, after the ‘60s, White privilege could still be a thing.
When children ask about Santa, adults lie to their faces. (Or by omission, like I did.)
Christmas is a gift economy. White privilege is a gift economy.
When Eddie Murphy gave voice in the early ‘80s to an exaggerated fantasy of what he imagined what White privilege consisted of, it was funny only because the humor was so crude. The skit clearly pointed to a fact that had some sense of truth to it1:
When Murphy, made up as a White man, goes to buy a newspaper, the clerk refuses to serve him as a customer. “There’s nobody else here,” the clerk tells him. “Take it. Just take it. Go ahead. Take it.”
“I began to realize,” Murphy narrates as he walks away from the newsstand, “that when White people are alone, they give things to each other for free.”
The skit grows more elaborate from there. “The problem was much more serious than I ever imagined,” Murphy intones.
The Santa myth, I hypothesize, carries on the Southern tradition of White privilege/White supremacy in symbolic form. As Christmas has overtaken American culture and interwoven itself into our culture, it appears as another form of the South that has survived the devastation of the Civil War, perpetuating itself alongside us. A caretaker ghost.
Something that Kelly says is instructive. One of her panelists brought up the fact that Harris also suggested putting forth a symbol of a penguin instead of an elderly White man, which is kind of a restrictive symbol for children who do not similarly self-identify. Kelly replied, “Well, that’s where she went off the rails.”
It would be more kid-friendly, the panelist replied, not taking the rebuff. The animal aspect would be more inclusive across a broader base of children. “That kind of makes all kids feel welcome in the process.”
“No,” Kelly said. “No, it doesn’t make all kids feel–it makes all birds feel welcome.”
With these words, she admits (a) that Santa is supposed to be welcoming to some children, and (b) not those children.
I have many more opportunities to come up with a better, more honest answer for my nieces and the rest of their siblings. The very youngest of their sibling group is three. I hope to hone a good, grounded answer that doesn’t avoid the truth. I’ll probably still find eggshells to dodge, though. That societal peer pressure is rough.
1Conspiracy theories, incidentally, function primarily because they usually contain a nugget of truth at the center. The lone fact gets fleshed out with embellishment.