Joshua Sur­tees

At Aun­ty Kam­la's chil­dren's Christ­mas par­ty I was pleased to see San­ta in an in­ter­ra­cial mar­riage. When the time came to dish out the presents, in came a white San­ta Claus and a black Mrs San­ta on their sleigh.

Weeks be­fore I had been won­der­ing whether San­ta (or Fa­ther Christ­mas as we Brits call him) would be white or black in the Caribbean. So my ques­tion had been half an­swered at Kam­my's Yule­tide bash.

Then, last week, Fox News an­chor Meg­yn Kel­ly pre­sent­ed a satel­lite link-up news piece with guests de­bat­ing an ar­ti­cle writ­ten by African-Amer­i­can blog­ger Aisha Har­ris ti­tled San­ta Claus Should Not Be A White Man Any­more.

"San­ta just IS white. San­ta is what he is," said Kel­ly with­out a trace of irony. Lat­er she said, mat­ter-of-fact­ly, "Je­sus was a white man too," just to re­al­ly stamp the seal of Chris­t­ian neo-Con­ser­v­a­tive racist white Amer­i­ca on­to the de­sign patent of folk­loric cre­ations and re­li­gious dis­ci­ples.

"San­ta Claus is imag­i­nary!" clam­oured mil­lions of ap­palled voic­es. But the sto­ry is more in­ter­est­ing than that and re­veals much about how his­to­ry (re­al or imag­ined) is con­struct­ed and by whom. San­ta Claus is of course based on Saint Nicholas, a re­al man who lived in Turkey in the 3rd and 4th cen­tu­ry AD. In the pic­ture ac­com­pa­ny­ing this col­umn a much younger me is stand­ing in­side the tomb of St Nicholas (al­so known as Niko­laos of Myra) in a place called Ly­cia in An­talya, south­ern Turkey. The pic­ture was tak­en in 2001, just weeks af­ter the 9/11 at­tacks. I was 21 and it was my first so­lo over­seas ad­ven­ture. I look skin­ny and scant­i­ly-clad, un­like Fa­ther Christ­mas who is fat, rosy­cheeked and wrapped up warm to keep out the cold.

The re­al Niko­laos of Myra, a gen­er­ous man who would leave gifts and mon­ey for peo­ple who de­served it for their hard work or good be­hav­iour, was Greek. He would not have been fat or worn warm clothes (it's hot in An­talya) and he prob­a­bly wouldn't have looked white, not in the An­glo- Sax­on sense.

By the 19th cen­tu­ry, the Dutch had cre­at­ed San­ta Claus (or Sin­terk­laas) a white Eu­ro­pean fig­ure as­sist­ed by a black boy called Zwarte Piet ("Black Pe­te") who is seen to this day in Dutch Christ­mas cel­e­bra­tions where white peo­ple cov­er their faces in black make­up to play this bizarre, racist char­ac­ter. It's just one ex­am­ple of the Eu­ro­peani­sa­tion, or even An­gli­ci­sa­tion, of world his­to­ry. A white San­ta is more palat­able (and mar­ketable) than a Greek one.

An­oth­er ex­am­ple is Je­sus. He hailed from Nazareth in the north of Is­rael (a city known as the "Arab cap­i­tal of Is­rael"), Christ was born a Jew and would sure­ly have looked like a mod­ern-day na­tive of the Mid­dle East, some­where be­tween Mediter­ranean and brown.

In re­nais­sance art in the 14th17th cen­turies, Je­sus was de­pict­ed not just as white but as a red­head (gin­ger in British par­lance.) In Raphael's Madon­na of the Mead­ow the in­fant Je­sus is be­ing giv­en a cross by the in­fant St John the Bap­tist. Both of them with porce­lain-white skin and fair red hair, like the Vir­gin Mary who

stead­ies Je­sus with her hands. The theme is re­peat­ed in Da Vin­ci's The Last Sup­per and in works by Dur­er, Messi­na, Man­teg­na, Bot­ti­cel­li and many oth­er artists of the pe­ri­od. This is strange, be­cause the ear­li­est known de­pic­tion of Christ from the 6th cen­tu­ry in St Cather­ine's Monastery on Mt Sinai in Egypt shows a dark-haired, dark beard­ed man with fea­tures one might de­scribe as Jew­ish or Arab.

"The dis­cus­sion over Je­sus's race is ridicu­lous," a Chris­t­ian friend told me, "it doesn't mat­ter. And if you're a be­liev­er you be­lieve Je­sus is the son of God. There was no sperm in­volved!"

Her point is that Je­sus, Chris­tians be­lieve, was im­mac­u­late­ly con­ceived so ap­ply­ing ge­net­ics or eth­nic­i­ty to him is ir­rel­e­vant. He can be any race, just as Aisha Har­ris's fa­ther used to tell her, "San­ta is every colour. What­ev­er house he vis­its, jol­ly old St Nicholas mag­i­cal­ly turns in­to the like­ness of the fam­i­ly that lived there."

But for an­chors on Fox News and the mil­lions of white Chris­tians across the Bible Belt and Mid­west of the Unit­ed States, Je­sus's colour clear­ly is rel­e­vant, and so is San­ta's. So when my friend told me that all you need is faith in Je­sus, not analy­sis of his bi­ol­o­gy, I ar­gued that the Chris­t­ian re­li­gion would be very dif­fer­ent if Je­sus, his­tor­i­cal­ly and con­tem­porar­i­ly, were de­pict­ed as a black man or an Arab, an In­di­an or a Chi­nese man. Would the An­glo-Sax­on world still have adopt­ed him as the Mes­si­ah, ac­cept­ed him as the son of God and wor­shipped him as the sav­iour? Peo­ple like Meg­yn Kel­ly would sure­ly not.

And what if Je­sus had been born a woman? Would she have been wor­shipped to the same ex­tent? And if Je­sus's fa­ther were con­cep­tu­alised as a woman rather than the ac­cept­ed no­tion of God as a man, would the world be a dif­fer­ent place to­day or would so­ci­ety have rewrit­ten her in­to a him and giv­en her a beard, like God and San­ta have beards?

"You're the first black San­ta Claus, thank heav­ens you came," riffs Prince Buster in the out­ro to his 1967 non­sense-verse song Earth­quake. But in Ethiopia, Haiti and oth­er black coun­tries, San­ta and Je­sus are com­mon­ly de­pict­ed as black.

It goes to show these fig­ures can be who­ev­er you want them to be.

Per­haps at next year's par­ty Aun­ty Kams her­self will dress up as San­ta and hand out gifts to the peo­ple. It's not so far-fetched. Af­ter all, by then the gen­er­al elec­tion will be just around the cor­ner. Ho ho ho.