Even before Moss was born, the holiday season had been a civil rights battleground — and Santa Claus played a prominent role.
He was there in 1863, midway through the US Civil War, sitting high atop a sleigh stacked with gifts for Union soldiers. One young drummer boy marvels at a wind-up jack-in-the-box toy. An older soldier, stocky and bearded, lifts a stocking filled with treats.
Santa Claus himself dangles a lanky wooden puppet from a string — a figure meant to mock the leader of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, a vocal defender of slavery in the southern states.
That image, which appeared on the cover of the national publication Harper’s Weekly, is considered one of the defining moments in the creation of the modern-day Santa Claus.
No longer was Saint Nick a stern, wizened figure. Cartoonist Thomas Nast had reimagined him as a jolly, elven man with a pointy hat and a paunchy belly.
The year the cartoon was published marked a turning point in the Civil War, the bloodiest conflict in US history.
That year started with the Emancipation Proclamation, an executive order from Washington, DC, declaring all enslaved people in the Confederacy to be free. It ended with key victories like the Battle of Gettysburg, which stopped the Confederacy’s advance northward, leaving it on the defensive.
Thomas Nast’s patriotic Santa Claus, however, was not the final word in the evolution of the holiday legend.
In Nast’s hands, Santa Claus was a symbol for the Union cause, clad in the stars and stripes of the US flag. In other hands, however, Santa was a propaganda tool of a different sort, helping to reinforce racial stereotypes.
Minstrel shows in the late 19th century married the figure with Blackface makeup to create imitation Santa Clauses who served as counterpoints to the benevolent white ones.
These Blackface Santas were subjects of ridicule. They were bumbling thieves and klutzes who tumbled down chimneys, landing in the roaring flames below. But most of all, they were symbols of an ongoing system of oppression that excluded Black people from inhabiting the Yuletide ideals of goodness, prosperity and hope.
But Black communities were also formulating their own version of Santa Claus, separate from the stereotypes designed to demean them.
By the 20th century, Black Santa Clauses had started to appear, offering a different narrative for the holiday season: one hinged on representation and empowerment.
In 1917, for instance, the Black Dispatch newspaper in Oklahoma published a cartoon on its front page showing an African American Santa scaling a wooden fence, each panel tagged with an obstacle to equality: segregation, mob violence, race hate and ill-paid labour.
Over the Santa's shoulder was slung a bag filled with packages labelled “love”, “education” and “justice”.
“It’s a high fence but I’ll get these things to ‘em,” the Santa Claus in the cartoon says.