Santa Claus Was Not White, He Was a Person of Color

By Charles McGuigan 12.2020

 Emboldened by a president who was endorsed by white supremacists (the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, among others), chowderheads, back in December of 2016, on around the feast day of Saint Nicholas, commenced a racist firestorm on social media and even tried to shut down that nightmarish entity of Minnesota origin—the Mall of America. The tender feelings of these delicate snowflakes were injured by the sight of a Black Santa Claus at this mega-mall actually taking white children up on his lap. To them, it was anathema of the most odious order, for Santa Claus, they believed, always was and always will be white as the driven snow.

And just this past month, Arkansan racists went ballistic. This time it was over a Christmas display in a North Little Rock neighborhood. The offense was an inflatable Black Santa, and the man who had the audacity to decorate his front yard with this abomination received a letter from one of his neighbors. It read like this: "Please remove your n---o Santa Claus yard decoration. You should not try to deceive children into believing that I am a n---o.  I am a caucasian (white man, to you) and have been for the past 600 years. Your being jealous of my race is no excuse for your dishonesty. Besides that, you are making yourself the laughing stock of the neighborhood. Obviously, your values are not that of the Lakewood area and maybe you should move to a neighborhood out east with the rest of your racist kind.” It was signed Santa Claus.

Well, guess what Virginia (and every other state in the Union for that matter, including Arkansas), Santa Claus was real and a man of color, not the Nordic manifestation given life and form in the 19th century by two very white men—Clement C. Moore and Thomas Nast.  

Here’s the real story.

Saint Nicholas, aka Santa Claus (santa, incidentally is of Latin origin, the root for the word “saint”; and Claus is simply an abbreviated version of Nicholas), was born more than seventeen centuries ago in the seaport of Patara, Lycia which is in present-day Turkey. Though his family was wealthy, Nicholas divested himself of his fortune after both his parents died during a pandemic that swept through his native village. He gave everything away to help those in need, and became a monk, later a priest and finally Bishop of Myra. He had a deep space in his heart for children, people without money, prisoners, thieves, and the disenfranchised of any sort. Quite a guy, and above all else he was deferential.

Perhaps the most famous story about this humble man involved three girls of less than modest means. Because their family was in dire straits, the three girls were destined to live out their lives as prostitutes. But Nick intervened. At night he dropped three sacks of gold either through a window or down a chimney to provide the girls with a dowry. The girls’ father, an elderly man, was elated. Those three sacks of coins morphed into golden balls that became the emblem still used today by pawnbrokers the world over. Which is why Nicholas is patron saint of pawnbrokers, among other things. He is also venerated as the patron of sailors, merchants, archers, thieves, prostitutes, children, brewers, bakers, unmarried people, students, and even wolves. Oh, and the way Saint Nicholas left these three gifts surreptitiously in the middle of the night, tossing them in through an open window or down the gullet of a chimney gave us St. Nick’s customary entrance into our home every December 25.

Miracles, of one kind or other, do a saint make.

When Nicholas was studying to become a priest, he boarded a sailing vessel bound for the great library of Alexandria in Egypt. Halfway across the Mediterranean, a storm rose up and with it fifteen-foot seas. The deckhands reefed the sails, but the ship listed hard to port and it seemed certain she would founder. Nicholas, who had been down below, climbed up to the deck and raising his arms to the pewter skies implored the wind to die down. And it did.

There are numerous miracles ascribed to this saint, so many in fact that he became known as Nicholas the Wonderworker.  Many paintings of the saint show him standing next to three young boys huddled together in a wooden barrel, a reference to the oddest miracle of them all, one that calls to mind Sweeney Todd and Hannibal Lechter.

The story goes like this: Three boys, sons of shepherds, wander into a village and are having trouble finding their way back home so they enter a butcher shop and ask the proprietor for help. The owner lures them into the basement, kills them, cuts them up like slaughtered pigs, and lowers their body parts into a massive barrel filled with brine. He plans to sell their remains as ham or other cuts of swine meat. Nicholas hears about this, enters the butcher’s shop, insists on seeing the barrel, and then performs something like the Isis/Osiris resurrection. Nicholas reassembles the body parts of the three boys and raises them from the dead.

In appearance, the real Santa Claus, outside of his beard and a red bishop’s robe, doesn’t in the least resemble the Santa popularized by Coca-Cola in the 1931.

 To begin with: Saint Nicholas was in no way overweight. In fact he was lean with a prominent forehead, and a receding hairline. He did wear the red robe of a bishop, but it was not rimmed with white fur, and there were no pants and no black belt. He did not wear black boots either; he wore sandals. And above all else he was definitely not white.

Merry Christmas!