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Christmas is, as Ebenezer Scrooge once opined, a lot of ‘humbug.’ While it’s true that since the Christians appropriated the good old pagan Saturnalia, this day has arbitrarily been appointed the day of Jesus’ birth – meaning a time of, apparently, joy and love.
It’s also true that the fine holiday of Saturnalia, with all its wine, dancing, song and general debauchery, has been watered down into general weediness.
Fun has transubstantiated into faith, and the whole season is ruined.
So believes the secular expatriate, of whom there are many from Europe. American expatriates, on the other hand, love it, and buy each other cards and terrible socks.
These same Americans also love, at this time of year, to celebrate Thanksgiving, which I believe commemorates the early Pilgrim settlers’ safe arrival in what later became the USA.
Ever since the election of Donald Trump, British expatriates to Kenya also enjoy celebrating Thanksgiving, grateful as they are for the fact that those bloody Americans left Britain and buggered off to another continent, at a safe distance across a vast ocean.
Christmas is Father Christmas or Santa Claus to the expatriate.
True, other things are also necessary for a ‘traditional Christmas’: presents, a Germanic evergreen tree, a roasted turkey, awful bread-and-herb stuffing, mulled red wine, Baileys Irish Cream and, for some arcane reason, tangerines and nuts, both of which can be cooked into Christmas pudding (a stodgy lump of steamed gloop) or Christmas cake (a stodgy lump of baked gloop).
But it’s Santa Claus who really matters.
There is a terrible racism in Santa. I don’t mean that Father Christmas is racist (the idea itself is frightening and ludicrous), but rather that the whole Santa-in-Kenya thing doesn’t work and should probably be disposed of.
Endless Christmas cards shows a white-skinned Santa, and those vile plastic supermarket Santas also presented a pinky Claus. Consequently, when the young expatriate child sees her first ‘Kenyan Santa’, she has that pathetic reaction that the racist European child had in the writings of Frantz Fanon, when spotting an African on the streets of Paris.
Worse, some northern European countries have their own ‘black face’ festive season characters. The Netherlands have ‘Zwarte Piet’ (‘Black Pete’), a ‘Black Moor’ who is often played by a white Dutchman in awfully racist ‘Black Face’.
Zwarte Piet is a sort of Santa, but his racist depiction should surely bring no cheer to anyone in the twenty-first century.
Black, with huge red lips, overly white teeth and shiny golden earrings, Zwarte Piet is like those racist pirates in Tintin (or was it Asterix?), whose clownishly stereotypical appearance reminds us of colonialism.
So, if the expatriate must celebrate Christmas here in a country that doesn’t necessarily need the festical at all, he should probably ditch Santa and, if presents are given, should probably just admit that he bought them rather than pretending that Santa brought them down the chimney.
After all, where, apart from the colder parts of Central Kenya, do chimneys really exist anyway?
