Dreaming of a white Santa

Megyn Kelly is defending last week’s comment on Fox News that Santa is white. She points out it was merely her tongue-in-cheek response to a tongue-in-cheek op-ed written by an African American who was lamenting that very fact – that in America, anyway:

“The most commonly depicted image of Santa does in fact have white skin. By the way, I also did say Jesus was white and as I’ve learned in the past two days – that is far from settled,” said Kelly.

Indeed you did, and indeed it is not.

For one thing, there’s the little matter of the First Commandment, which says “Thou shalt not make any likeness of anything that is in heaven above” – where Jesus is…telling me that God himself does not want us to know his Son’s race.

Although he probably had a typical darker Middle Eastern complexion because Judas had to go up to him and kiss him to tip off the arresting officers. If Jesus had looked European, Judas could’ve just stood at a distance and said – go arrest the white guy.

But as for Santa’s race: As long as everybody’s gonna jump into this, I want to put in a plug for our family’s tradition which was that, you never saw the real Santa. According to my Dad, who worked on Madison Avenue and knew something about advertising, the Santas in the ads and in the department stores were actually Santa’s “helpers.”

Even as a 5-year-old, I’d figured out that Macy’s and Gimbels couldn’t both have the real Santa.
And also, as I recall, any journalist, if they truly thought there were children in the audience, wouldn’t presume to issue declarations on family traditions that were none of their business.