Secular Christmas; Or, What's Inside an Igloo Cake?
I’m 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’s November, and, even though it’s still officially before American Thanksgiving, nowadays we’re at full-on Secular Christmas blasting at us by November first, and even some Christmas marketing before that mingled with Hallowe’en. The episode that was playing as I wrote has the contestants making igloo cakes…and 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 “peace on earth,” 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’re masquerading as human, and you don’t realize they’re not until the end of the story, or the first thing they say is “Fear not,” which tells us that seeing an angel in its natural state immediately causes terror in human beings. People who’ve 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’re a Madeleine L’Engle 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’s ok to mention the miracle with the oil (though not the military and political context), and it’s 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’s 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’t eat the penguins, though they may have snowball fights with them. The reindeer seem to be imports from Norway, not local caribou. Occasionally there’s a yeti hanging about the margins … that Asian import may be thanks to the 1960s stop-motion Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. It’s 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’t live in the igloos: those are apparently made by either polar bears or penguins, not Inuvialuit peoples. Last year in my Children’s Literature course we read Fatty Legs, the middle-grade memoir of Margaret-Olemaun Pokiak-Fenton, a child who in her family’s 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. …
But wait! What if we read Santas’s workshop as a residential school? What if the elves are taken young from their families to work in the workshop? Presumably, it’s 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’t make the grade for stockings or tree ornaments, but it’s fat they need, not sugar, to keep them warm. Do they get any education? Doesn’t look like it. They’re famously mischievous—maybe when they play tricks on Santa and Mrs Claus, it’s like Olemaun getting back at The Raven by ridding herself of the ugly red stockings she’s 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’t 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’s 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’s inverted thief, who climbs at night
Down chimneys, into dreams, with this world’s 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’s anonymous again,
Just one of the crowd lunching on Calvary.
Tom Lehrer's "Christmas Carol" on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtZR3lJobjw