A thoughtful reader sent me email on a controversy about Black Santa. I have to say that's a subject that have very close to zero interest for me. Of all the black things to be, a black Santa would be fairly low on the totem pole.
About 9 years ago, when I first moved back to California, I couldn't wait to have my first Christmas party in my new place. I found the lyrics to every Christmas carol I could find as well as all of the midi files I could download from the web. (There were almost no MP3s in those days). So I duplicated the songbooks and prepared everyone to sing. I got everybody Santa hats, so we were all black Santas. And since then I've always honored the tradition of wearing a Santa hat out in public during the holiday season. (Dang, I gotta do that today!) That's enough for me.
But one more thing I did was load up on some Christmas trivia which included information about the origin of St. Nick and his assistant, Black Peter. Now I originally recall Black Peter from one of the many books by Ishmael Reed that I read as I approached liberation theology, but the details are rather obscure. Depending on where you read your sources, Peter was the one who carried that big bag of gifts for Father Christmas, or he was the one who put a lump of coal in your stocking if you pouted or wasn't good. Therefore he was either the force for materialistic beneficence or materialistic humiliation. Either way his was the actual hand of justice while St. Nick presided over the entire affair being.. well rather saintly.
Now back in the days when I was not attempting to be a paragon of righteousness for the benefit of my own children's moral upbringing and my wife's standing in the community, I had plenty of trickster up my sleeve. So a character the likes of Black Peter would immediately appeal to the Bugs Bunny in me, which was comparatively larger in the days of Louisiana Red than it is now. So it is very likely that rather than doing something almost completely brain dead as changing the skin color of Santa for the self-esteem of thoughtless minorities, I would have invested in the more subversive and historically accurate manifestations of Black Peter. In fact, if I were of the Progressive ilk, bound and determined to make a mockery of the less profound aspects of this national holiday, I would find in the legend of Black Peter, a goldmine of possibilities.
Alas, I find it just as amusing to have at this my 45th Christmas an artificial tree which is shorter than I for the first time ever. The larger the spirit, the less important the symbols. So I'll let whomever do whatever with the legends and colors, frimfram sauce and chifafa on the side. My inner Who is singing dahoo dory all the same.
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