David McElroy

Are we really arguing about what color Santa Claus is? Has anyone broken the news to the people arguing that he’s just a fictitious character?

That’s right. Santa doesn’t exist. But that hasn’t stopped culture warriors from trying to turn him into a cause. On Fox News this week, anchor Megyn Kelly started the ball rolling.

“For all you kids watching at home, Santa just is white,” Kelly told viewers. “Santa is what he is…. I wanted to get that straight.”

Other people have struck back, arguing that to claim Santa is white is “oppressive.” In the Los Angeles Times, there was a piece about why “we deserve a Santa for the people, not just white folks.” Over at the progressive left website Think Progress, they were writing about “Megyn Kelly’s fear of a black Santa.” And a blogger at the conservative Washington Times was defending Kelly and writing about “why Santa Claus’ skin color matters.”

One of my friends reports that a very intelligent friend of his believes that “having a white Santa is just cultural dominance over a disenfranchised and unempowered race and we might want to consider transitioning to a less-white Santa and for me to insist that a character keep his image just because said character is and always has been depicted as a white male is oppressive in nature.”

That’s right. Our culture has been reduced to arguing about whether a fictitious character’s ethnicity is “cultural dominance” over “disenfranchised” people and what kind of Santa “we deserve.”

To all of the combatants, I simply say, “Who cares?”

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When I first saw Beth Wednesday, she looked like a woman who had just won the lottery. She was grinning from ear to ear and looked as though she might start bouncing off of walls at any moment.

“I passed! I passed! I made it!” she told me, as though she assumed I knew what that meant.

I was in an office on a college campus and Beth had just come out of a computer lab where she had checked her final grades for the semester. She had passed all of her finals and she had excellent grades. She had successfully completed her first semester of nursing school.

She explained all this to me and told me that she was so excited that she had to tell someone — and I was the first random stranger she saw. It made me happy to see her so jubilant, so I asked her to step in and tell me more.

Beth is about 40. On this day, she seemed on top of the world. But she kept telling me that she had been afraid she would “blow it.” I kidded her about whether she has a history of negative self-talk.

“Have you been talking to my therapist?” she asked jokingly. “Seriously, that’s what she’s always telling me, that I’m always expecting the worst and saying bad things to myself, but that’s the way it’s felt since my husband left in the middle of the semester.”

All of a sudden, this happy story sounded much more interesting to me — and more complicated.

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I have very few pictures from my past. I save few mementos, at least not in an organized fashion. I have boxes of junk that I’ve pulled out of desk drawers when I’ve moved in the past, but only because I haven’t gotten around to discarding the 99 percent of it that’s junk.

When I talk to others about their past, they frequently pull out photo albums or scrapbooks. I have very little like that to show. If you want to travel through my past, my bookshelves are the place to start.

I spent an hour Monday night idly looking through my books. I wasn’t looking for something to read. I wasn’t even opening them. But spending time looking through books I haven’t read in years — just touching them and reading the titles — is a bit like time travel. Even if I never read a book again, it seems to carry a bit of me in it — whatever I was like when I experienced the book the first time.

This German history book takes me back to when I was a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of Alabama. I was taking a class covering the development of modern Germany starting in the 19th century and looking at how Hitler eventually came to power. Each Monday afternoon, I spent three hours listening to Dr. David McElroy lecture in a dry but informative voice on the third floor of ten Hoor Hall. (We shared more than our names. Oddly, Dr. McElroy and I also drove identical cars.)

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