Northern Bias

There’s an awful lot about Christmas traditions that just ain’t politically correct. 

The big thing this year is the argument about the ethnicity of Santa Claus. 

There have been news stories about a father who was enraged when his second grader was denied the part of Santa in the school Christmas play because the kid is African-American.  I can’t blame him for being upset, but the discrimination cuts both ways.  A former co-worker was the target of dirty looks and eye rolls at Wal-Mart because he told the (brown skinned) sales clerk that he wanted an inflatable Santa that was white.  If there was ever a no-win situation, that was it – if he had installed a dark skinned Santa in his front yard, Somebody would have compared it to installing a Lawn Jockey.

The fact of the matter is that the original St. Nicholas was the Bishop of Myrna, a town located in what is now modern-day Turkey.  Chances are that St. Nick had at least a Mediterranean tan - that he was several shades darker than the fat Nordic fellow portrayed in the Coca Cola ads.

When you come right down to it, you have to admit that the whole Santa thing displays a definite Northern Bias.  Santa’s home/workshop is supposedly about as far North as you can get, - at the North Pole. The North (magnetic) Pole is somewhere on Ellesmere Island in Baffin Bay, which means that the Jolly Old Elf is a resident and probably a citizen of Canada.  Making him Canadian is just good marketing – nobody (except the kids from South Park) hates Canadians – but it does subtly underscore the geographical preference.

Never mind what PETA might have to say about using a whip on reindeer, the whole idea of delivering presents in a sleigh rings false in most of the world. 

We have only had Christmas snow on the Texas Gulf Coast once in my lifetime, and, although there was some on the ground south of us, we didn’t get a single flake at our house!  Just try talking snow to kids from Florida, Southern California or Hawaii, they may try to have you committed.  And what about kids in Australia where Christmas comes right in the middle of Summer.

As my P-C friends are fond saying, it isn’t FAIR!

In an effort to be as inclusive as possible, I posted the picture at the top of this article.  It shows members of the scientific expedition in Antarctica working on their Christmas tree.  Here’s what the tree looked like when it was done, this time from a Southerner’s point of view: