Secular Christmas; Or, What's Inside an Igloo Cake?
I鈥檓 writing the first draft of this blog post while sitting at home with the remains of a nasty cold and the Food Network showing a marathon of Holiday Baking Championship. It鈥檚 November, and, even though it鈥檚 still officially before American Thanksgiving, nowadays we鈥檙e at full-on Secular Christmas blasting at us by November first, and even some Christmas marketing before that mingled with Hallowe鈥檈n. The episode that was playing as I wrote has the contestants making igloo cakes鈥nd who lives in igloos? Penguins, of course.
North American Secular Christmas is about super sweet frosting swirled over all the missing things. There is no Christ in Secular Christmas. The closest you get to anything Christian is the wish for 鈥減eace on earth,鈥� I guess. And cute baby angels with pretty white wings, pink faces, and little halos. In the Judeo-Christian scriptures, angels come in two varieties: either they鈥檙e masquerading as human, and you don鈥檛 realize they鈥檙e not until the end of the story, or the first thing they say is 鈥淔ear not,鈥� which tells us that seeing an angel in its natural state immediately causes terror in human beings. People who鈥檝e tried to record encounters with angels have sometimes talked about many sets of wings and eyes as a way to explain their awe-inspiring, terror-inspiring appearance (if you鈥檙e a Madeleine L鈥橢ngle fan, think the cherubim from Wind in the Door, not cherubs from Italian frescoes; Akwaeke Emezi's Pet and Sofiya Pasternack's Black Bird Blue Road also feature scary angels). But nobody on Holiday Baking Championship is going to put shepherds or a stable or a baby Jesus on their cake. For the token Hanukkah episode, it鈥檚 ok to mention the miracle with the oil (though not the military and political context), and it鈥檚 ok to show a menorah, even if the emphasis often goes on gelt and dreidels. But there must be no Christianity in view during Secular Christmas.
Secular Christmas is Santa Claus, reindeer, elves, and the North Pole. The North Pole is covered with snow and ice, but it鈥檚 a happy playful easy place to live. Even the elves are happy and mischievous while making toys. The local wildlife is polar bears and penguins (even though penguins are Southern Hemisphere). And the polar bears don鈥檛 eat the penguins, though they may have snowball fights with them. The reindeer seem to be imports from Norway, not local caribou. Occasionally there鈥檚 a yeti hanging about the margins 鈥� that Asian import may be thanks to the 1960s stop-motion Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. It鈥檚 unclear whether the elves are somehow indigenous to the land or Scandinavian/Sami settlers or slave labour imported by Settler Santa.
But the elves don鈥檛 live in the igloos: those are apparently made by either polar bears or penguins, not Inuvialuit peoples. Last year in my Children鈥檚 Literature course we read Fatty Legs, the middle-grade memoir of Margaret-Olemaun Pokiak-Fenton, a child who in her family鈥檚 tent has dreams of literacy and Wonderland for her time at residential school in Aklavik, but instead finds herself being dressed in lightweight and unsuitable clothing, being fed a poor diet and Catholic prayers, and doing forced labour. The current Secular Christmas version of the Arctic is more like Wonderland than Residential School. 鈥�
But wait! What if we read Santas鈥檚 workshop as a residential school? What if the elves are taken young from their families to work in the workshop? Presumably, it鈥檚 the human children who get all the toys they labour to produce, not the elves or their parents at home. The little green outfits the elves wear are clearly not warm enough to keep them healthy at the North Pole. Do they get fed? What do they get fed? Maybe they eat the candy canes that don鈥檛 make the grade for stockings or tree ornaments, but it鈥檚 fat they need, not sugar, to keep them warm. Do they get any education? Doesn鈥檛 look like it. They鈥檙e famously mischievous鈥攎aybe when they play tricks on Santa and Mrs Claus, it鈥檚 like Olemaun getting back at The Raven by ridding herself of the ugly red stockings she鈥檚 been forced to wear. Small moments of rebellion are all that oppressed and imprisoned people can usually risk. If the elves went on strike, maybe Santa wouldn鈥檛 start beating and starving them (at first), but there would be heavy guilt laid on them for disappointing millions of little North American children. Are their forced smiles and laughs merely frosting over intergenerational trauma and elves buried after the exhaustion of the Christmas rush?
What鈥檚 inside the super sweet frosting on the igloo cakes? Are they hollow, are they merely the empty calories of capitalism, or is there a whiff of rottenness and graveyards when we cut into them? Christianity has had a lot of rotten bits over the centuries, as people took the good news of peace on earth and freedom from Roman oppression and remade them into ways of war and oppression, Pax Romana again, instead of Christmas pax. Believe me, I understand those who reject all of Christianity because of the rotten bits, but I want a peace that welcomes and centres the voices of the marginalized. I want Christ in my Christmas. Nice healthy Bread of Life, not igloo cakes.
Comment: Shannon (my minister) reminds me that Secular Christmas moves people to be generous and to connect with their families, so it's not all useless or bad.
Two bonuses to close out this post: 1) a Howard Nemerov poem from 1960, and 2) a link to Tom Lehrer's "Christmas Carol" from 1959...I guess it didn't take too long for some Americans to figure out where the post-war boom was heading!
Santa Claus, by Howard Nemerov
Somewhere on his travels the strange Child
Picked up with this overstuffed confidence man,
Affection鈥檚 inverted thief, who climbs at night
Down chimneys, into dreams, with this world鈥檚 goods.
Bringing all the benevolence of money,
He teaches the innocent to want, thus keeps
Our fat world rolling. His prescribed costume,
White flannel beard, red belly of cotton waste,
Conceals the thinness of essential hunger,
An appetite that feeds on satisfaction;
Or, pregnant with possessions, he brings forth
Vanity and the void. His name itself
Is corrupted, and even Saint Nicholas, in his turn,
Gives off a faint and reminiscent stench,
The merest soupcon, of brimstone and the pit.
Now, at the season when the Child is born
To suffer for the world, suffer the world,
His bloated Other, jovial satellite
And sycophant, makes his appearance also
In a glitter of goodies, in a rock candy glare.
Played at the better stores by bums, for money,
This annual savior of the economy
Speaks in the parables of the dollar sign:
Suffer the little children to come to Him.
At Easter, he鈥檚 anonymous again,
Just one of the crowd lunching on Calvary.
Tom Lehrer's "Christmas Carol" on YouTube: