June 16, 2015

2015.06.16
I was thinking about this snippet some African-American kids would sing around my high school gym class: "I don't care what the White Man say, Santa Claus is a Black Man"

I'm realizing now for the first time that that line may have influenced my fall from faith a few years after I first heard it: the socially-constructed aspect of religion felt incompatible with the sense of supernatural cause-and-effect that I felt was necessary for it being The Truth, and having my attention drawn to the assumptions I had been fed about Santa later had an echo in how I felt about a world that had so many mutually incompatible religions in it.

Anyway, I've had only mixed results in finding the source of what the kids in my high school were singing. By far, the closest match in sound is this clip of Freddy "Boom Boom" Washington sounding calypso on Welcome Back Kotter. If there's a source the character is quoting... I don't think it's this parody of I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus. It might be this song, but what my schoolmates were singing was definitely closer to the Kotter version.