My kids shouldn’t use brown ink to color their Santa figurines like I did.

Give any friend a story

As a subscriber, you have 10 gifts to send every month. Anyone can read what you share.

When I was growing up, Christmas would not be complete without the various brown markers, crayons and colored pencils scattered on the kitchen table during the holidays. Long before the diversification of merchandise sales, my mother, like many black parents in the 1980s and 1990s, always turned the MacGyvered peach skin Christmas figurines into a mirror image of our own family. Mom carefully colored the faces of the elves on the decorations, the angel tree top hats, the carols on the Christmas cards, and most importantly, all iterations of Santa Claus himself were treated with brown marks.

Our Santa Claus is black, but to the young me, he is not a black Santa. He is just Santa Claus and does not need adjectives. Sometimes my mother told me that because of the lack of brown ink everywhere, we had to paint his face with color. This was an untenable excuse. I naively believed that until the bigger plot hole in the Santa’s story It started to show up when I was about 10 years old.

In the next 20 years, until I gave birth to my son in the summer of 2011, I didn't have too many thoughts about Santa Claus. That Thanksgiving, we got a cute second-hand Santa Claus suit. When I stuffed my son's sturdy brown body, I felt dizzy about my childhood. Ready to reproduce the same holiday wonderland that I grew up with, I take my heart and my wallet-open my heart to buy decorations. When my childhood has passed for 20 years and the image of Santa Claus is still as homogeneous as ever, the two quickly closed.

Just like my mother did, I scribbled on my face in brown ink. But my colors are colored by a healthy indignation—my mother grew up in the countryside of Jim Crow, Virginia, which is a luxury that cannot be afforded. My mother grew up in the same place and time with the seven Martinsville who were executed by mistake, and taught in a segregated first-grade classroom on the day Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered. Based on the scale of the racial trauma she has experienced in her life, the color on Santa’s face is almost the bottom of the insult.

But for me, the lack of a dark-skinned Santa Claus feels very personal, as if the image of my family has been left out. Not #OscarsSoWhite but #SantasSoWhite, and it's not just Christmas gadgets that are disappointing. Movies, TV shows, picture books, and all other forms of mainstream media feature white Santa Claus. These mass-produced Santa Clauses do not necessarily reflect our personal reality: actor George Takei (George Takei) memorably described the visit of Asian Santa Claus when he and his family were horribly and unfairly detained in Japan. American detention camp.

It will take years for these one-off stories to snowball into the now booming Santa Claus diversity movement. It was 2011, when Instagram and Pinterest were just emerging, so the only influencer I searched for the brown-skinned Santa was Google. I used a search engine to find an Etsy seller in Atlanta who sent a personalized letter from Black Santa to my son. On eBay, I won expensive but exquisite homemade accessories and handmade clothing.

I spent hours calling various places around Los Angeles until I finally found Langston Patterson, one of the few black shopping malls in the United States at the time. Taking pictures of my son with this delicate Saint Nick is the highlight of our Christmas, and we look forward to it every year until my live broadcast work moves my family to New York City.

I think it’s easier to find a black Santa in the most diverse city in the world, and it turned out to be so, but it’s only because the executive producer of my show is a generous black mother and she brought me to her Under the protection of and gave me inside information. Just like Harriet Tubman navigating people along the underground railway, she and her daughter kindly led my family to find the secret black Santa at Macy’s. The department store called it a "special Santa", which could only be done by mouth and ear. According to legend.

At Macy’s, we waited in a slow-moving line, with the “traditional” white Santa hiding in the last room until a specific elf appeared. My mother's tutor leaned close to the elf's pointy ears and whispered, "We are looking for a special Santa." The elf nodded and gave us a thumbs up. Soon thereafter, another elf escorted us to a separate but equally long line, where we waited until a happy black Santa magically appeared and let my 2-year-old son get through by giving him a fist and a high five. This season.

In the taxi home, when our satisfied son was sleeping in his car seat, my husband and I briefly chewed on the absurdity of this extremely unusual experience, but I was exhausted and succeeded for us. Be proud of keeping the child's love for him Santa Claus lived for another year.

Two days after our visit to Macy’s, Aisha Harris published a lively article on Slate, expressing my personal experience. "There are fewer and fewer whites in the United States, but Santa Claus who lacks melanin is still the default choice for advertisements, shopping malls and movies," she wrote. "Isn't it time for our Santa Claus image to better serve all the children he loves every Christmas?"

The next day, TV host Megyn Kelly responded with a notorious tirade, declaring that Santa Claus and Jesus are white. She spoke directly to the camera and assured all the children who watched Fox News that although they may have heard of anything, Santa Claus is definitely white, and anyone with a different idea is not only incorrect, but also ridiculous.

As a mother, I am very angry. As a storyteller, I am determined to prove that she and other closed-minded people are on the wrong side of history. I am not alone. Over the years, when I was planning on the manuscript for my new picture book "The Real Santa" (this is the black Santa Christmas story I want my children to read), other entrepreneurs who have had enough Start to take action.

Now, the Black Santa Company of former NBA star Baron Davis, a small-town gift packaging company called Wrappers Delight and other seasonal businesses are planning a future where no children will have to color another Christmas decoration again.

Our efforts are working. Mine is one of at least three picture books published this year featuring non-white Santa Claus as the protagonist. We all have very different views on his looks, and the more representative the better.

Let us discard the notion that Santa Claus has only one iteration, and stop arguing about whose interpretation is correct. It's time for us to put the power of Christmas narrative in the most precious and important place-the children's own imagination.

Nancy Redd (Nancy Redd) is a live broadcast host and author of many books, including "Bedtime Hat" and "The Real Santa". She is also a commentator for Wirecutter's beauty and health products.