‘White’ Christmases for Black Boys

A couple of weeks ago Braydon bought a new Christmas book for K & O. They quickly fell in love with it and have requested it to be read to them at least once a day since. It is a great book with wonderful illustrations and I want to especially highly recommend it to parents of precious little black boys out there in the blogosphere. The book is An Angel Just Like Me by Mary Hoffman, illustrated by Cornelius Van Wright and Ying-Hwa Hu. Check it out! This year, with Kyle and Owen at age 4.5, our Christmas season has included a newly emerging sense of awareness on the part of our boys. This is an awareness that was only slightly present in previous years but is now in much fuller force. Images of white Santas, white snowmen, white angels, white nativity scenes, white snowflakes, white snowscapes, ‘white’ Christmases are everywhere. K & O (as well as –and this is an important point– all the rest of us) are being bombarded with it everyday. Braydon and I try very hard to counter-act it in our own little oasis of our home. We conscientiously and purposefully present counter-images — on our walls, on our Christmas tree, in the books that we read to them, in our own little nativity scenes, on the covers of the Christmas music CDs we’re listening to, in the decorations we put out, in the way we tell our own stories. But still, no amount of counter-action could possibly balance it out, and the effects of the ‘white’ Christmas are understandably profound. ‘Where am I in all of this?,’ they seem to be asking with their questions and statements and theories about all things Christmas. Things like An Angel Just Like Me are important for our boys during this season because these things give a strong, confident answer to their question by saying: ‘You, too, my beautiful black boy, are right here in the middle of all of this.’