I searched in vain for the sermon of bygone years where I said we really shouldn’t be too critical of the 1969 invented holiday of Kwanzaa since our American Christmas – the cards, the tree, Santa, and the snow-covered landscape – we’re all if not invented at least embraced in America’s 19th century. The funny part to me has always been the last, the snow-covered landscape.
Walking around my New Orleans’ suburb neighborhood before Christmas there would be Santa and his sleigh and reindeer on the green lawn being serenaded by crickets chirping, tree frogs croaking, and mosquitos buzzing. And with John Lennon I thought, “So, this is Christmas?”
It doesn’t make sense that Southerners are triggered (Used intentionally to show by bona fides with latest psychobabble.) for Christmas by snow and cold for that matter. For 25 years now the weathermen around Austin have told me of the chance, or not, for a white Christmas. Really‽
Snow and cold are part of the American Christmas because of where it was birthed, embraced, popularized, and spread from the North East to South and Midwest. Get ahold of the Cajun Night Before Christmas read it as a Cajun would. That’s their proper triggers right there.
Still I hear songs that have no Christ in Christmas “Sliver Bells” and “White Christmas” and I’m triggered. I think every Boomer is. The latter song is vintage WWII and you can imagine how soldiers and sailors overseas heard it. Of course, Boomers probably heard it first in the 1954 movie “White Christmas”. Read The Last Stand of Fox Company; it’s the gripping account from the Korean War of how 246 Marines held-off over 3,000 Chinese from taking Fox Hill. This was the critical point for the trapped 1st Marine Division to escape the Chosen Reservoir. This took place 27 November – 2 December 1950. After repeated attempts to dislodge the badly wounded, hungry, freezing, and dwindling in number, Marines, the Chinese resorted to floating strains of “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” over their positions.
Let me give you a more uplifting firing point then this for when “White Christmas” plays this Christmas. It’s February 1975, the violence in Vietnam that followed the United States pullout led to “The Indochina Migration and Refuge Assistance Act of 1975” which provided for the evacuation and resettlement act of refugees from Vietnam.
Eight-year-old Hau Thaitang’s mother worked for Chase bank and lived in the city of the South Vietnamese government that was falling. His mother, father, and little brother would be evacuated. They could each bring one bag. They were to listen to Armed Forces Radio not for news about how the war was going or the evacuation, but for the prearranged signal.
For two long months they waited, with those 4 bags packed, as the war grew ever closer. Than at last in April they heard the signal to move to the rendezvous point for evacuation. The signal was the song “White Christmas” playing over Armed Forces Radio in April, in Saigon (Baim, A.J., “A Vietnamese Refugee’s 50-year Journey and His Boyhood-Dream-Come-True Career in Detroit”, AARP The Magazine¸ April/May, 2025, 69).
I don’t know if Hau Tahitang was a Christian or not but if so, his “triggering” would be closer to the Christian Christmas. “But when the fulness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, 5 in order that He might redeem those who were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption as sons. 6 And because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’ 7 Therefore you are no longer a slave, but a son; and if a son, then an heir through God” (Galatians 4:4-7).
His “White Christmas” meant rescue from being under the repression of the Communist, freedom, a whole new life, a whole new citizenship. You know like us: “For our citizenship is in heaven, from which also we eagerly wait for a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ; 21 who will transform the body of our humble state into conformity with the body of His glory, by the exertion of the power that He has even to subject all things to Himself” (Philippians 3:20-1).
Merry Christmas! Now if we can just somehow redeem “Sliver Bells” and by an even bigger stretch the Texas carol “Merry Christmas From the Family.”[i]
[i] I tried in a 12.25.09 sermon titled the same and found here https://www.trinityaustin.com/archive/sermons/641.
