Okay, guys. Santa is a MYTHICAL CHARACTER. I know he’s based on a real historic person; we’ll get to that. But foremost, at this point in history, Santa Claus is a personification that arose from a certain culture in order to illustrate the virtue of altruism. And myths change as the culture re-telling the myth changes. That’s a perfectly normal and natural thing for a myth to do. That’s why hardly anybody tells the version of “Little Red Riding Hood” where Red eats “meat and wine” that turn out to be chunks of her grandmother’s flesh and blood anymore. We tell the myth differently. We also tell the myth of Santa differently depending on where we are. In the Netherlands, as David Sedaris famously told us, Santa is accompanied by “six to eight black men” who used to be called his slaves but are now called “helpers.” The myth changed because the culture changed for the better, and now the Dutch understand that it wouldn’t be appropriate for the personification of altruism to be using slave labor. That’s how myths change. Santa can be any race we want him to be depending upon the stories our culture tells, the way artists portray him, who gets hired to play him and what’s convenient at the time. He can be a hedgehog. In fact, I flustered for so long over whether I should use a black or a white Santa for the photo illustration in this post, I’m going with a hedgehog in a hat.
But, of course, the historic truth is even worse. The historic truth is that Santa is neither a jolly European white guy nor a black man, nor a hedgehog in a hat. Santa Claus is based upon Saint Nicholas, who was the Greek bishop of Myra in what is now Turkey. He was born in what is now Turkey. He’s Greek and sort of Turkish, insofar as Turkey didn’t exist as a country at that point in history, but that’s where he’s from. If you’re going to boycott over inaccurate Santa portrayals then I hope you don’t have any shopping to do in the month of December, because Santa Claus is neither black nor white. He’s tan. He’s said to have traveled to Egypt, which is of course part of Africa, at one point in his life. He was imprisoned by Diocletian so I guess he knew what an Italian looked like. But it’s very likely that Santa Claus never once in his life saw an Aryan white person from northern Europe. He probably met Caucasians from the Caucasus Mountains. But if he had gotten into a time machine and gone to the Mall of America in Minnesota, or to a traditional German Christkindlmarkt, he wouldn’t have had any idea what he was looking at.
I don’t think he’d have minded being portrayed by black or white people instead of Greek Turkish people, mind you. Because Saint Nicholas is a saint, a truly generous and altruistic soul, more or less the opposite of a person who threatens to boycott a shopping mall because the man being paid to give candy canes and photo ops to children is black.
And that’s kind of my point. This whole controversy is nearly as far from what we should be thinking of at Christmas, as you can possibly get. Christmas is about a God so good that He became a man– and not just any man, but a persecuted minority and a refugee, so that all men and foremost the persecuted and the refugees could be one with Him. He grew up to be a poor manual labor so that our poverty and day-to-day labor could become a thing of God. He was slandered, tortured, thrown out of town as an unclean thing and executed by a totalitarian state, in part so that none of us should ever have an excuse to look down upon the victims of slander, the tortured, the ostracized and the persecuted. Whoever it is that you think isn’t worthy to pass out candy canes in a mall– whoever you think is an inferior person whose presence is ruining your Christmas– this is the person Christ chose to become, in order to glorify them and in hope of converting you.
That’s what Christmas is for: conversion, and celebrating that we have this wondrous opportunity to be converted. And a true war on Christmas is anything that seeks to distract us from our conversion and the joy of that conversion. This is what holy men like Nicholas and myths like Santa are supposed to spur us to do– to convert and be generous, as our Heavenly father is generous.
Glorify Him for His generosity, this Advent and Christmas season. Cast down your idols, whether they’re white Santas, wars on Christmas or ceramic hedgehogs. Take your children to see the mall Santa if you like, have a great time, eat candy, be of good cheer, but do be sure to teach your children what good things Santa represents.
And be sure to teach yourself as well.
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