I

Hear Santa’s sleigh with the bells-

Silver bells!

What a world of merriment their melody foretells!

How they forecast joy that’s coming,

In the dis-play at the mall.

While the stores with music thrumming,

And the Christmas carol humming,

While it’s barely even fall.

Spending cash, cash, cash.

Though my purchases seem rash,

It’s that time of year when my credit card bill swells.

All the bells, bells, bells, bells,

Bells, bells, bells.

II

Hear the song, “Jingle Bells”—

Catchy bells!

What a tale of Muzak, now, their repetition tells

As I rush to do these chores!

Countless presents, countless stores.

In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of my folly,

In a mad interpolation demanding I stay jolly,

Making my skin feel crawly

With a new hatred of holly

And a resolute desire

To shout at Target’s newest hire.

Awful bells, bells, bells.

What a tale their inanity tells

Of despair!

How they clang and ring and roar.

What cloyingness they outpour

On the bosom of the nutmeg-scented air.

And my heart distinctly tells,

How desperation sinks and swells,

As they knell, knell, knell,

All the bells, bells, bells, bells,

Bells, bells, bells.

While the stores with music thrumming, And the Christmas carol humming, While it’s barely even fall.
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III

Hear the tolling of the bells-

The doorbells!

What a world of frustration their interruption tells!

In the silent calm of night.

Oh, carolers! I feign delight

At the sentimental blitheness of their tone.

For every song that floats

From their cozy, be-scarfed throats

Recalls my own

Forgotten joy.

Now my grown-up heart’s a stone.

I never dream of sugarplums,

Only of Amazon orders that never come.

And with all the songs about Noels,

My forced smile grows so numb.

Why isn’t this eggnog spiked with rum?

To the Salvation Army bells,

“I gave last week!” I yell.

To the reindeer with the bells,

I turn the other way and run,

And their king is he who knows,

And he “ho, ho, ho’s”

From the North Pole where he dwells.

And the jollity he compels

Never wanes but only swells!

Forget the exhaustion it impels,

I must obey the bells,

All those bells, bells, bells, bells,

Bells, bells, bells.

Oh the jingling and the jangling of the bells.

It’s nearly impossible not to think about time—the hurtling of our bodies and planet through the inky-blank cosmos across the strange continuum that demarcates our mortal coils, our very consciousness as a species—when The Holidays roll around each year.

It’s a heavy season.

(Listen to Establishment cofounder Katie Tandy read her story.)

Even a hard-boiled atheist like me who has managed to largely relegate Christmas to brimming glasses of Pimm’s Cup, roaring fires, velvet dresses, and too many pigs in a blanket with dijon mustard, can’t help but enter a kind of personal reckoning with the immediate year of yore.

There is an uncanny feeling that washes over me when I hear Bing Crosby start to warble. I feel my boundaries grow faint, and suddenly I am 4, 10, 15, 25; I am also 34. I am here, right now, and so too are all the ghosts of each Christmas.

Some of those ghosts are mischievous and rattle the windows and hide my jewelry. Some are lovelorn and pet my head while I sleep; I can smell their tears. They smell like old copper.

Some are rageful and like to push me around. They like to splash white wine into cut-glass goblets and howl. But each time I whip my body about to confront the shove that sent me sprawling, there is nothing there but my thumping heart and I feel foolish.

Some of my ghosts are kind and beautiful. They smell like burnt butter and fatwood and damp tweed and Virginia Slims and they love to turn the music too loud and help decorate the house. They’re partial toward anything sparkly and always want to eat beef bourguignon for Christmas dinner. They wrap all my presents with too many ribbons and always hide the tape so cleverly that it breaks your heart to tear into a parcel that perfect.

Some of the best ghosts hang my stocking on the mantle with two thumbtacks because it’s so heavy with trinkets; they lend me their scarf when they want to play bocci in the waning light of dusk on the lawn.

Christmas ghosts complicate my time. They remind me that things are not linear; time is tangled, circuitous; you can — like Meg from A Wrinkle In Time — travel to any point in your life and wander around a while.

I think some people use journals or therapy to do these kinds of travels.

Me? I use ghosts and things.

I use a kind of inverted psychometry. Whereas regular psychometry allows someone to hold an object and understand who made it, where it’s been, and all the people’s lives it’s passed through, I am able to imbue objects with meaning, with memories, with ghosts.

Some of my ghosts are kind and beautiful. They smell like burnt butter and fatwood and damp tweed.
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People tease me about being a packrat — my collection of things is extraordinary and dusty and heavy and takes over a lot of surface area and is seemingly eccentric. Does someone NEED a sixth full-length black dress from this coastal thrift shop? Well, yes, I do. Because when I take it out of the closet I remember that that was Valentine’s Day two years ago and I’d gone backpacking and camping with a dear friend who rolled her ankle as she burst into, “Giants in the Sky — there are big terrible giants!” from Into The Woods and I almost shit myself laughing, but also felt terrible because she was limping pretty badly.

We found that dress together when we finally got back into town, into Pescadero, and we were just in total lady-love and I was reminded, which I needed desperately, that female friendships are imperative to my joy.

What people don’t understand is that with every object, I’m building a memory palace. This is more than being sentimental. I’m building a time machine.

I love the coupled foreverness and ephemerality of things. Things from antique shops, flea markets, tag sales, and second-hand shops that are filled with other people’s sweat and tears and laughter and life-dust.

And then I fill them with my own.

I am, incidentally, dating a wonderful Jewish man — Jake! — from Marblehead, Massachusetts; he says I’m teaching him to Christmas this year.

We’ve rented a small cabin-y house in Guerneville, California, for December and January. It’s in a redwood grove, so regardless of what temperature it actually is in town, it’s 35 degrees and shadowy as hell at our place; you can always see your breath. It’s a ghosty place.

Anyway. I was, as a packrat, very excited of course to decorate for Christmas and because we didn’t have any ornaments or doo-das or anything, we had to go to Goodwill to get some — obviously — so my spooky, packrat, ghost-loving being was just beside itself with the sheer possibility of the psychometry that awaited me within these fluorescently-lit walls.

I strolled the aisles tsking tsking and gasping and snatching things and holding them to the light, considering their potential for Christmas joy. “Find all the string lights you can,” I said, jabbing my finger to an adjacent aisle. “Even colored ones?” he asked suspiciously, not wanting to waste time or go too far astray from the very discernible path comprised of Christmas fervor fever-dreams.

We are nesting; we are playing house the only way I know how.

“Just how kitschy is too kitschy?” I point to a foot-tall gilded Santa. Jake eyes it warily, but he’s smiling. “It’s…pretty amazing.”

“Plus. It’s kind of an homage to Guerneville right?! He looks just like a fabulous bear!” (Guerneville is known for its very robust gay scene.)

“I don’t know…” he says and wanders off to take another lap. “Look for Christmas balls too!” I holler to his back. “And ribbon! Oh, and wrapping paper maybe!”

Some of my Christmas ghosts are traipsing behind me. They’re burning my fingers with hot glue guns as I make wreaths with my mother; they’re ripping open the orange Stouffer’s box of Welsh Rarebit with my dead grandmother so they can make the cheese fondue.

I find a box of wired gold leaves — Jake loves those — and a box of green sparkling Christmas tree candles complete with stars on top. They’re so ugly and beautiful. He doesn’t love those, but he gets it. They’re ugly-beautiful and that’s an aesthetic I’ve marked much of my life by.

Then he inquires about a…“Christmas tree skirt?”, a phrase he stammers out like a foreign vocabulary word from tenth grade. “Yes, yes! You’re right. We def-need a skirt. You pile all the presents on it!”

He’s starting to feel weary from the lights; I feel that this Christmas elf’s spirit is waning. “Let’s check the fabric section and then we can go I promise!”

He finds a red plaid blanket woven with gold threads. It’s perfect. A good-bad 1950s-esque vibe. We stuff it into our basket and make our way to check-out where even the curmudgeonly woman can’t deny my stupid joy about these stupid glass balls and tacky gem-stone stars.

We pick up champagne from the gas station and I get to decorating the minute I get home; I make a bagillion hooks from wire for all the balls and start to cry when Bing belts out, “the child, the child, sleeping in the night, he will bring us goodness and liiiiiiiiight!”

We’re headed south for actual Christmas though. My brother has just bought a house in Montecito and they’ve just moved in; we’re leaving on the 22nd to road-trip to Southern California and have a poolside Christmas after our perfectly spooky, cold, couple-cozy pre-festivities in the forest.

…and then the fires get bad in Santa Barbara and Montecito. Footage starts rolling in that is haunting, harrowing; orange flames lick trees and houses and destroy lives.

The fires have consumed more than 230,000 acres and 1,000 structures.

The air was growing blacker and as the fires drew closer, my brother grew ashen, reticent, frightened. He was desperately trying to shift his paradigm — “Things are just things ya know? It’s really putting things into perspective” — but his voice belied his heartbreak and the grindings of his mind as he imagined losing all his possessions.

He’s like me. His objects are magical to him. They conjure. They carry his boyhood and his adventures and his sense of self. His possessions, his home, are a kind of museum that he visits on the daily. He could tell you about every matchbox car, every pair of sunglasses and sneakers, every salt-shaker and Scout ad he owns. He has two back-up hard-drives of his photographs that I venture have been collected and sorted, as expected of the curator he is, for the past 20 years.

The idea of him losing his memory palace — a place also poised to be the place where his children would truly call home — broke my fucking heart.

He finally called me yesterday and said he was going to join his wife and son who had fled to Florida a week ago; he was still holding out hope that the fires would subside, the smoke would dissipate, and we could all be together.

It was not to be.

“I got the two things out of the house that were haunting me though, Katie. Mike’s guitar amp and grandpa’s World War II camera.”

Our grandpa — Russell Haviland Tandy — was my father’s father and taught us both the art of storytelling — there is, perhaps, no greater joy than a well-told yarn. There are few people on this earth that can capture the room the way he could, swilling a stinger. (That’s a lethal drink he loved made up of brandy and creme de menthe).

I doubt the camera works — although knowing my brother he’s taken it to every local shop to see if it could be fixed — but this is an Object, regardless of its functionality, that is not to be trifled with. My grandfather — Hula, his friends called him — filled that camera with photographs from the war; he filled it with tiny slivers of his life rendered in 3–1/2 by 5 prints (Kodak called this the 3R size). And now my brother has filled it with all kinds of memories and feelings that I can’t begin to glean or understand. But my ghosts see the ghosts of my brothers’ and they’re madly waving hello.

As for the guitar amp, my uncle recently died — he left behind his daughter who is just 30 years old. They were very close — exceptionally close; her loss is the most profound. I imagine it will be a kind of bifurcating life-gash; there was my life before my father died, and my life after.

Michael was a music lover and talented guitarist. He showed my brother The Wall by Pink Floyd at an utterly inappropriate age; he showed him the power and the glory that is Rock ‘n Roll. Is there any greater joy?

My Object of Michael’s is an admittedly pretty ugly tapestry woven from wool — it depicts a gathering of musicians all gathered in a circle playing together rendered in a pseudo cubist style. As long as I can remember, it hung in his music room; it is filled with the tuning of guitars, of his growling voice….“paranoia strikes deep, into your life it may creep…” as well as his more gentle croonings, “All my life’s a circle, sunrise and sundown…the moon rose through the nighttime till the daybreak comes around…”

It’s filled with him urging me to, sing, Katie! Man, you’ve got a great voice. (I was never going to be a guitarist.) Is there any greater joy?

This Christmas I am turning to my ghosts to help me celebrate. I am turning to the past and I am turning to the future.

If aliens watched Hallmark movies to understand what the winter holiday season is all about, they’d likely presume it’s a time of sugary sweetness and uncomplicated bliss.

If aliens spent time with actual humans over the holidays, they’d likely come to a very different conclusion.

True, the holidays can be a time of great love and good cheer. But they can also be a time of messy dysfunction and unexpected tragedy.

Often, they’re a bit of all of the above.

To celebrate the true spirit of the season, we asked writers to send us short essays about the holiday they’ll never forget.

Aliens, take note.

That Christmas I Got My First Period At A Homeless Shelter
By Jessica Sutherland

There, I discovered blood on my panties: Of all the days, in all the places, I had Become A Woman at a fucking homeless shelter on Christmas Day.

That Christmas With The Awkward Cat Death
By Laura Lily Rose

Our flight happened to be the last flight out on Christmas Eve. We had spent a ton of time packing and my sister had spent a ton of time panicking but finally we were in the sky soaring over central California. The plane landed and we picked up our bags and crammed into an Uber. The ride to the hotel was talkative and fun. I had honestly forgotten that we even had a cat — until we were upstairs in the hotel room setting our stuff down.

That’s when my sister’s phone rang.

That Chanukah I Celebrated My First Faux-Pas-Filled Christmas
By Sarit Luban

As a child, non-Jewish peers had frequently remarked that Chanukah must be cooler than Christmas because you got presents for eight days instead of just one. Not in my family. My parents had resisted the Americanization and commercialization of Chanukah, urging us to focus on its historical significance and generations-old rituals. On a “good year,” I was lucky to receive even one gift. So I did not enter Christmas expecting much, or anything, really.

That Christmas My Dad Ripped Off The Top Of A Tree
By Tamara J. Lee

The morning after that lunch, I was working to deadline and considered not answering the knock on the door. But the second — emphatic — knock worked.

Fir tree branches, like hands, greeted me.

That Christmas We Got Three Curling Irons From The Salvation Army
By Maranda Elizabeth

Like most people, we had no need for three curling irons in one household.
“We should have told them we’re 16,” one of us said.
“We shouldn’t have told them we’re twins,” said the other.
“We shouldn’t have told them we’re both girls.”

That Christmas I Walked Out On A Megachurch Propaganda Film
By Brianna Meeks

My parents excitedly gathered me, my fiancé, my brother, his girlfriend, and my younger sister into the living room. They’d decided to screen a non-nativity Christian film called “Courageous” — a weird Christian propaganda film written, produced, and (I’m pretty sure) starring the pastor of a megachurch in Georgia named Alex Kendrick.

Around 1:30 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day this year, I was crying in a blessedly secluded corner of New York’s bustling Port Authority. I’d missed my bus north by about five minutes and was inconsolable. Because I hadn’t gotten up a few minutes earlier, I’d missed my chance to eat with my family. I felt especially terrible because my grandmother was due for intense surgery in a few days, and nobody was sure what the outcome might be.

Sniffling, I called my girlfriend and arranged to meet her out on Long Beach for her family’s festivities. Although she’d had some difficulties over the past year with a few family members because of various aspects of her gender transition, by and large, you couldn’t ask for a more accepting family. Apparently, when you celebrate the holidays at a middle-aged lesbian couple’s house, queerphobia and invasive questions in general are kept to a minimum . . . and nobody talks about politics.

In fact, I’ve only met one family more accepting of transition — and that’s my own.

At last year’s holiday gatherings, even though I’d only been out to them for a month and change, I could count the number of times I was accidentally misgendered on one hand; my aunt, whose first words to me were “This will take some getting used to,” began correcting herself without prompting after just a few hours together. I was sad not to see them again this year, but happy to have found another accepting clan.

Acceptance isn’t something that often comes naturally from the families of those who are transgender. Scrolling through Facebook the day before, I scanned countless posts from friends who were nervous about (or resigned to) the familial horror show they were about to endure. Others talked about being cut off by their family members the night before Thanksgiving. “Holidays are the time I miss having family the most,” wrote one of my nonbinary friends.

Lest any cisgender readers think I merely have exceptionally depressing Facebook friends — well, maybe. But according to the most recent data available from the National Center for Transgender Equality, about one in five trans-identified people experience rejection from their families because of their gender identity. One in 10 suffer violence at the hands of family members after coming out. A quoted respondent said that after coming out, their parents “told me to leave and not come back. I spent the next six months homeless.”

Transgender people of color experience higher rejection rates than the average; 37% of Middle Eastern trans folks and 38% of Native Americans reported familial rejection. My heart breaks for all the Native protestors at Standing Rock, but especially the trans people who risked their lives in the face of frigid fire hoses and tear gas without even the love of their families to keep them warm.

Things are getting better; these numbers are significantly down from the NCTE’s previous survey, and 60% of trans people polled said they were supported. But when our families do reject us, they do it violently — and if nobody’s around to catch us when we’re pushed out, the fall can be deadly.

As we drove back to Brooklyn on that Thanksgiving, my girlfriend dozing in a food coma beside me in the back seat, my mind drifted to these kinds of numbers and how much luckier I am than so many of my siblings — my “chosen family.” I may be among those whose relationships ended as a result of my gender, but my biological family remains intact, and my ex and I are close friends. I thought back to this summer, when I attended my cousin’s wedding in Manhattan without fear of being cornered by some drunken uncle and berated for wearing a pink dress. How many ways could my life be endlessly worse than it is now?

For this reason, I reflected, I don’t often feel comfortable discussing my family with others in the trans community — especially my sisters, who are most likely to experience familial rejection. I’m touched that some of my closest friends count me as part of their chosen family, but every time that phrase is mentioned, I feel tremendous guilt that I’ve somehow held onto my mother, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and sundry cousins.

Well. I hung onto the ones on my mother’s side, anyway. After my father died almost five years ago, his side of the family fell out of touch with my mother and me, and nobody’s made much of an effort to get in contact with me since I started wearing skirts in public. I think four out of five of them voted for Trump anyway — but as much as I’d like to dismiss them out of hand as a bunch of out-of-touch white cisgender conservatives who don’t know what a cool chick I am these days, I still miss them. I know I won’t be welcome at my aunts’ houses anymore, so I won’t get a chance to play soccer again with my cousin, the athlete. I won’t have dinner at Grandma’s and hear her play lounge-lizard tunes on the piano after dessert. I can’t go back to the house in the country where I grew up.

But still, I kept more of my family than I could have hoped. Nobody hit me, nobody interrogated me every time they saw me, nobody adamantly refused to use my pronouns unless I acted or dressed a certain way. And so I find myself a privileged member of a group defined by its lack of privilege: a girl who cherishes her mother while her sisters long for their parents to talk to them like they’re people.

We have our chosen families — but how do you mend the hole your blood relatives make when they abandon you?

I’ve found myself trying to alleviate this (admittedly irrational) guilt by introducing my mother into my friends’ lives. When we talk on the phone, she goes out of her way to call me her daughter and tells me how angry she is that my friends “lost their mama bears.” She’s been dipping her toes into the waters of voice coaching, and I’m hopeful that she can help my community in a tangible sense, but I also just want the people I love to feel like they have a mother again. The winter holidays are about family and sharing, so why shouldn’t I share my family? As Hanukkah, Christmas, and other gift-giving holidays approach, can I gift-wrap my bloodline to share it with those I love?

Maybe these feelings are misplaced, and perhaps I should be focusing my energy elsewhere. I don’t know. All I’m certain of is that I’m one of the luckiest girls in the world, just because my biological family loves me — and that knowledge is enough to make me cry all over again.

Seventy years ago this Christmas, the world first learned how much worse things would have been without the existence of George Bailey. Frank Capra’s 1946 Christmas classic, It’s a Wonderful Life, was a lyrically corny tribute to the virtue of small-town USA and the wonderful, good-hearted patriotic small town folk, like George, who live in it.

Watching the film this bleak Christmas season, though, it’s difficult to enter fully into its spirit of democratic communal celebration. Last month, across the nation, heartland Americans like good old George (Jimmy Stewart) and his loving wife Mary (Donna Reed) joined with wealthy creeps like Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore) to give a bigoted authoritarian the nuclear codes. The bustling scene at the end of the film, with cheerful neighbors crowding into George’s front hall to celebrate and wish him well — are those scenes of communal democratic virtue? Or are they scenes from a fascist rally where the participants have just removed for a moment their “Make America Great Again” caps?

The sinister, Twin Peaks-esque darkness beneath the surface of Bedford Falls isn’t just a post-Trump retrospective interpolation. It’s a Wonderful Life has a very conscious current of bitterness and despair running through it. On the surface, of course, George Bailey is depicted as a kind of saint who “always thinks of others,” and is universally beloved. Jimmy Stewart, transcendentally handsome and equally charming, totally makes you believe that women would throw themselves at George Bailey while angels descend from heaven to tell him how awesome he is.

Bailey’s good cheer and easy brilliance has a flip side, though. Talented, dazzling, confident, George wants to get out of Bedford Falls, see the world, do great things. Yet fate keeps thwarting him. His father has a stroke just as George is about to leave town, and he has to take over the family bank. He has to use money set aside for his honeymoon to stave off a bank run. He never gets out of Bedford Falls; he never fulfills his dreams. He lives a normal life, when he could have been extraordinary. As the devious Mr. Potter tells George, speaking with the tongue of Satan:

George is, in short, a victim of relative deprivation. A petty bourgeois bank owner and successful small-scale entrepreneur, he is not poor, but neither is he as rich as that crafty, big banker elite Mr. Potter, who schemes against him. George is galled by his lack of success, and that gall turns to anger, despair, cruelty, and a kind of egotistical fugue.

When his Uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell) loses $8,000, and the bank is threatened with ruin, George becomes positively frightening. “Where’s the money, you silly stupid old fool?” he rages. “Where’s that money? Do you realize what this means? It means bankruptcy and scandal and prison! That’s what it means! One of us is going to jail; well, it’s not gonna be me!” Jimmy Stewart storms away, lanky form twisting in anguish, shirt unbuttoned, coat askew, and hurtles himself at his home and family, raging at his wife, breaking furniture, snapping at his little son, “What’s the matter with our car? Isn’t it good enough for you?”

In theory, this is an unusual response to a one-time stress. But when Mary reprimands him, she doesn’t say, “Why are you behaving so horribly?” Instead she demands, with exasperation, “George, why must you torture the children?” — which could apply only to George’s current bad behavior, but which might also mean, “why must you [always] torture the children?” One has to wonder if he’s tormented the children with this kind of tantrum a few times before, or even habitually. George’s anger and violence seem so much more real than the cheerful, idyllic American façade, that the rest of the film feels like a stage set erected over an abyss.

The film’s famous final half hour, in which an angel shows George what the world would be like without him, is supposed to demonstrate what a wonderful person George really is, and redeem him from his paroxysm of resentment. But you could also see the alternate reality sequence as a kind of psychotic break, in which George gets exactly what he wants — a demonstration of his own virtuous awesomeness and a sweeping revenge on those whom he feels diminished him. George’s brother, the war hero, who escaped town, becomes a corpse. George’s wife, who kept him from leaving town and fulfilling his dreams, becomes a timid, spinster librarian caricature who, unconfined to a domestic role, is miserable. She, and everyone, must suffer, so that the film can make George feel better about himself.

It isn’t just individuals who are worse off without George; it is the town itself. George stood up to the malignant Potter. In his absence, lovely homey Bedford Falls becomes callous, alienating Potterville. Horrified, George wanders through a Potterville festooned with ratty bars and dens of iniquity.

One sign of that iniquity is, notably, integration. The first real sign George gets that the world has changed radically for the worse is when he walks into a formerly cozy family bar and sees a black man playing rowdy piano. Black people exist in the “real,” Georgeful world, but they are servants and boosters, not independent individuals performing on their own without a white family to guide them. George, it turns out, was the dam protecting the real America from a flood of ominous jazz.

The obvious analog to Trump in It’s a Wonderful Life is Potter — the “scurvy little spider” bloated with wealth and ego, who wants to put his own name (Potterville! Trumpville!) on everything he owns. Onscreen, George refuses to work with Potter, no matter how much the elite banker offers to pay him.

But offscreen, in 2016, not all Georges were so virtuous. Capra’s film shows a world in which fairly well off white men demand paranoid validation of their own importance, and reject a world in which that importance is undermined by gender or racial progress. George is a bulwark against the corrupt elites; without him, urbanization will ooze in, causing black people to be independent and gender roles to warp, leaving a wake of loose women and spinsters cluttering the streets.

We need George to shore up the American verities, whatever those may be. It’s a wonderful life for white male small bankers, and all those — including quite possibly Mr. Potter — who see themselves in white male small bankers. Or at least, it better be a wonderful life. If it isn’t, there are many George Baileys willing to break America to make it great again.

By Carol Hood

Back in December, 2013, Fox News’ Megyn Kelly caused a social firestorm when she declared without any doubt in her mind that Santa just is white, and Jesus is too, and it is just so so ridiculous for anyone to suggest otherwise! Now Kelly has cut off all her hair and become some sort of pseudo-feminist crusader against Donald Trump because he let her know that his privilege is totally better than her privilege and she wasn’t having that. Also, the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn., hired its first Black Santa — and oh my sweet Mary and Joseph, did white people lose their minds.

The backlash was marked by the usual unoriginal “OMG PC culture ruins everything!” drivel, and the classic, “It’s racist to make Santa not white because then you are making it about race” switch-up. Soon, the furor grew to calling Santa-elect Larry Jefferson (a VET, mind you) “feces in a Santa suit.” These model citizens even threatened a boycott to protest the very idea of anyone ever imagining Santa as anything but white. In fact, the reaction was so volatile that the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, who ran the original story, had to close their comments section. Upon reading all of this, I was amused/bemused/baffled/not-baffled — a familiar blend by now — by the absolute gall of White America and its self-centeredness. The white people losing their shit over Larry Jefferson didn’t even realize that throughout their idyllic be-white-Santa-ed childhoods, little Black children like me were often ushered into “secret” areas and back rooms to get our pictures taken with the “Special Santa.” The one I like to call the #JimCrowSanta. The Santa who looked like us.

I grew up with festive Christian parents, who decorated trees, sang Christmas carols, attended theater at the church, and of course went all in on the presents. We had our personal traditions: counting Christmas lights, watching It’s A Very Muppet Christmas Movie on December 23rd, and yes, fully buying into the magic of Santa. From December 1st until the 25th, my imagination ran wild with excitement, fantasizing about Santa in his workshop, toiling away at the lists filled with the names of countless children. I wrote Santa letters every year (which were always answered by my mother). I left Santa milk and cookies every other year (which were always eaten by my father). And my parents made sure that I always got to visit Santa, every holiday season.

Little Black children like me were often ushered into “secret” areas and back rooms to get our pictures taken with the “Special Santa.” The one I like to call the #JimCrowSanta.
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For the most part, like the Santa of the Star-Tribune commenters’ idyllically segregated childhoods, our Santa was white. But one Christmas season in Chicago, I believe I was five or six, my cousins and I got the #JimCrowSanta for the first time. We were at the Water Tower, waiting in line; I distinctly remember wearing these pink sparkly boots that I just had to get photographed. As I was practicing my poses, one of Santa’s helpers ushered out the line by one of Santa’s elves and taken into a smaller and more discreet area. All three of us were confused — we’d already seen Santa, he was the other way! But they took us through a door and another door and lo and behold, there was another Santa. He sat there grinning, arms wide: HO! HO! HO! I practically fell to the ground trying to beat my cousins to his lap. I could not wait to tell him what I wanted for Christmas (A PUPPY!) and show off my cool sparkly boots. I remember sitting on his lap first, and then seeing his rich brown skin.

Did this somehow ruin my childhood? Hell no. My personal vision of Santa’s powers only blossomed. I decided that Santa was Black at that moment simply because he wanted to be, and I felt closer to Santa than ever before. I rediscovered a pride in my appearance that had already begun to slip away. It was as if the most important man on earth (besides Daddy) was acknowledging me, and I carry that pride and happiness until this very day.

The Jim Crow-ness of it all has long shadowed this otherwise happy memory. But the cruelty of celebrating a white Santa Claus while quietly taking Black children to the Black Santa In The Basement never truly hit me until I witnessed the extent of white possessiveness when it came to Mall of America’s choice.

In general, Americans who celebrate Christmas can trace their Santa entitlement to Finnish-American artist Haddon Hubbard Sundblom and other marketing minds behind Coca-Cola’s wildly successful 1920s holiday print ads. Sundblom’s image seeped into the American spirit, and soon became so ubiquitous that I remember standing at a holiday parade in Europe and practically blowing a mind-gasket when the last float passed by featuring a staunch, moody, and (gasp) skinny Saint Nick. I remember spitting out my hot chocolate, rather obnoxiously exclaiming, “Santa Claus is supposed to be fat!”

At this point, the “Let’s Get All The Facts First” racist would probably interject that the European version of Santa is probably more historically accurate, even if Americans think he’s too thin, as the myth of Santa Claus (St. Nicholas, elided to Sinterklaas) mostly comes from Germanic folklore. Oh okay, we’re playing the “historical accuracy” game about the magic presents man with the flying reindeer? How about this: ol’ St. Nicholas himself was a Turkish man — born in Demre, Turkey — with Greek nationality, meaning that he, at very least, was an ethnic man who could pass for white. How you like them very brown apples?

Putting aside history, though, Santa Claus became more myth than man a long, long time ago. He’s immortal. He employs elves. He flies all over the world, not by plane but by flying sleigh, delivering presents to the children in a matter of hours. He’s incredibly body-positive. He has to be six feet something and 300 pounds, but maintains Olympic-level athleticism, able to hop from chimney to chimney and leave presents under the tree with no trace he’d ever been there. Why is it so hard to imagine that maybe Santa switches his ethnicity from time to time because why the hell not?

There’s nothing wrong with white Santa. Santa can be white, too. But if Santa is white and only white then the inclusion of other religions and customs is even more imperative. Give room and space to learn and appreciate other customs with their own happy myths that acknowledge their own histories. That isn’t a “war on Christmas” — that’s being a decent and learned human being. One who has not actively murdered the creativity, imagination, and ultimately intelligence of their children — and subsequently themselves — for the sake of white supremacy.

Yes, well I want to marry Benedict Cumberbatch and move to Paris, but that’s not going to happen, now is it?

It would be nice to set my Out Of Office Auto-Reply to “Gone Fishin’ With Benedict Cumberbatch Except Not Really Just More Figuratively,” but I don’t really know how to do that.

You know, I’d like to wrap Benedict Cumberbatch up in a burrito and eat him, but my local Chipotle probably has E. coli.

I want Benedict Cumberbatch to put up holiday decorations while I mix us Manhattans and contemplate an erotic — yet festive — lighting scheme, but I have very limited lighting options in my house.

I’d like Benedict Cumberbatch to watch the whole 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice with me on my couch — twice — but I accept that he’s probably busy with Patrick Melrose right now.

I’d really enjoy helping Benedict Cumberbatch pick out another great black skinny tie, but I must accept that he can probably do that on his own.

I’d like to take Benedict Cumberbatch to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to determine which classical Roman nose most closely resembles his own, but doubt I have enough miles saved up.

It would be my greatest desire to help Benedict Cumberbatch write his letters to Santa on behalf of the world’s children who seek joy and hope, but I would actually be terrible at that.

I’d like a Benedict Cumberbatch-shaped garden gnome for Christmas, but I’m not aware that such a thing is manufactured.

I want to take a scenic mountain drive with Benedict Cumberbatch and occasionally stop to look at historic old mills and crumbling barns, but my car is really, seriously covered in dog hair.

I want Benedict Cumberbatch to put up holiday decorations while I mix us Manhattans and contemplate an erotic — yet festive — lighting scheme, but I have very limited lighting options in my house.
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I’d like to live on a houseboat and have Benedict Cumberbatch write me poetry in rigid and challenging forms like the villanelle and the sonnet, but I don’t seem to have a houseboat at present.

I would love to take Benedict Cumberbatch to the Monterey Bay Aquarium so he can work through the fact that he looks like a hot otter, but I don’t imagine I’m going to be in California in the near future.

I would enjoy chatting with Benedict Cumberbatch about the challenges that actors face when they approach a role, but he hasn’t engaged me on the subject.

It would be a joy to go to Target with Benedict Cumberbatch and pick up some holiday décor and perhaps a few groceries, but I just went to Target last weekend and should probably rein it in.

I want to hang out with Benedict Cumberbatch and his mum at the Chelsea Flower Show, but I acknowledge that they probably wouldn’t take me as I know very little about flowers.

It would be delightful to circumnavigate the globe with Benedict Cumberbatch and several cases of champagne and quail eggs, but I get seasick on open-ocean ferries.

I’d like to give Benedict Cumberbatch an ugly Christmas sweater and then climb all over him like a holiday Jungle Gym, but rumor is he’s not into ugly Christmas sweaters, so that’s just too bad for me.