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My Childhood on Creepy Santa’s Lap
He was my version of clowns, a symbol of jolly that scared the hell out of me.
Santa Claus and I have a weird history. I’m not sure I ever actually believed in him, but he didn’t need to be real to leave me feeling some kind of way.
As a kid, I spent a bit of time on the laps of White men who were pretending to be him, and although I usually smiled for the camera, I was never altogether comfortable sitting there. When I look at pics of me with those White Santas, I often wonder what they were thinking about the chubby little Black boy perched on their lap.
A lifetime of racism has ruined a lot of things for me, including my early memories of those real-life Santas. I now reconsider them through the prism of my grown-up racial awareness. Kissimmee, Florida, was not a bastion of racial harmony in the ’70s, and it’s not a given that race ceased to matter when those White men put on the Santa suit. Despite Megyn Kelly’s insistence that Santa Claus was a White man, a few Black Santas might have made all the difference in the world to me then — and probably would now, too.
Even without race coloring my view of Santa as a child, I still was somewhat unsettled by the way he was portrayed both in the media and by real-life men. He was my version of the clown, a symbol of fun and jolly that kind of scared the shit out of me.
Maybe it was the way he looked. His big, ruddy white face was so covered up by white whiskers and a floppy red and white hat that pretty much the only thing you could see were red, white, and his eyes. I remember sitting on the lap of the guys who’d dress up as Santa at my mom’s annual company Christmas parties, wondering who was behind all the fakery.
I’d always been told to steer clear of stranger danger, but there I was, plopped on some strange lap, and everyone around me was smiling about it. I didn’t even know what he really looked like. My mother didn’t seem to have a problem with it, but I couldn’t imagine any other circumstance in which she would have given her blessing to such an awkward arrangement. I guess, in a way, Santa was my first silver daddy.
