The Un-Christmas
Some of us may already be on Christmas vacation, and others of us may be anticipating the break if even for a day. Black people in America have a love-hate relationship with Christmas for a lot of reasons.
During slavery, the Christmas holiday was peak time for running away. During the Christmas season, slave owners were more lax about slave whereabouts in many cases and actually gave time off. Slaves were allowed to pick a log to burn and didn’t have to work for as long as it burned. Needless to say, they tried to choose what they believed would be the longest burning log in the pile!
This was also the time of year that some slaves would get better food portions that might include actual meat and not just the fatty parts of the pig.
Many Black people today do not celebrate Christmas for a lot of reasons, some say it blasphemous, others say it is hypocritical, and others still say that it is a pagan holiday and doesn’t matter.
I probably agree with all of them and think that it should be like every day, you should live your best life, whatever that means for you.
The Writer
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