Quiet as it’s kept, much of world is sweating, not shivering, on Christmas Day | Opinion

Americans are enduring the frenetically festive shopping season surrounding a holiday that’s still known as Christmas in some parts of the world. The season’s dominant themes — snow, ice, frost, reindeer and Santa Claus — are virtually inescapable from Miami to Manila and points in between.

Yet, On Dec. 25, there is rarely even a hint of snow, ice, frost or reindeer in most parts of the world. South of the equator, millions of people will be enjoying the official start of summer. North of the equator, millions more will be enjoying balmy December weather. The bikini-clad sun worshipers on South Beach and the Copacabana could just as well be singing “O Tanning Buns” instead of “O Tannenbaum.”

Snow is also rare in the Holy Land — although, in 2013, parts of Israel did get pounded by an unseasonable blizzard in December. Jerusalem experiences just four days each year on which a bit of snow falls — typically one day in January, two in February and one in March, with nothing but an occasional trace of snow in December. And the city’s average December temperatures — highs in the upper 50s F, lows in the lower 40s —aren’t exactly conducive to a lengthy life expectancy for Frosty the Snowman.

Back in the USA, late December’s high/low temperatures average 78/60 in Miami and 68/48 in L.A.

Having a warm December climate prevail in so much of the world raises a question: Why is Christmas so inextricably linked to freezing weather? Why do Hawaiians and Key West Conchs sing about dashing through the snow in a one-horse open sleigh instead of weaving through the waves on a Jet-Ski or a surfboard? The shocking answer: Billions of us are victims of “cultural colonialism.” Here’s how it’s defined by Blackwell Online:

“Cultural colonialism refers to two related practices: the extension of colonial power through cultural activities and institutions (particularly education and media) or the asymmetrical influence of one culture over another. The latter is most often understood as the cultural domination of Southern societies by the global North.”

Within the context of the United States, Florida certainly qualifies as an example of one of the “Southern societies,” but who or what is “the global North?” The U.S. Census from a time when many of America’s cultural norms were being established offers a clue. In 1810, out of the entire nation’s known population of 7.2 million — a total that included approximately 1.2 million enslaved people — well more than half of the free populace lived in New England and three Mid-Atlantic states: New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

In an era when literacy was limited and books were the dominant medium for circulating ideas among the educated class, publishers in Boston, New York and Philadelphia already were beginning to establish their cultural hegemony over the young nation.

The snowy region’s dominance was still evident in 1830, when Clement Clarke Moore’s 1823 poem, “A Visit from St. Nicholas” was taking root in the popular imagination. Eventually, it led to Santa Claus’s becoming a central figure in the Christmas season. Adios, Jesus; hello St. Nick! As of 1830, New England and those same three Mid-Atlantic states still had well over half of the entire nation’s free populace and virtually all of the publishers.

Fast forward to 1930, when the emergence of a new medium — network radio — was beginning to link together the nation’s disparate regions. Network radio’s content — and later network TV’s content — was determined largely by the tastes and perceptions of the bosses who ran the networks then based in Manhattan and the ad agencies along Madison Avenue. They were in a city that was then — and remains now — noticeably different in its composition and viewpoints from the hinterlands, that vast inland area that Manhattan sophisticates and Hollywood celebrities disdainfully dub “the flyover zone.”

When network radio emerged, the Snow Belt still had three times the population of the Sun Belt, which even then was still recovering from the Civil War’s aftermath and mired in the worst of the Great Depression. Poverty-stricken residents of this lagging region were often the targets of ridicule generated in the nation’s cultural capitals, Manhattan and Hollywood.

As for the presence of snow in virtually every yuletide scene, the absurdity never seems to dawn on those very parochial Snow Belt folks. While icy weather and Christmas may be synonymous in New York and Norway, many more folks now live in places where it never snows.

Take Florida, for example. Now that it has eclipsed New York to become the nation’s third most-populous state, isn’t it time for Floridians to join with residents of other warm climes, ignore the fake snow and ditch the firs for palms? After that, we warm-weather folks could launch a global initiative to lead other parts of the world that are still nominally Christian in a song about dreaming of a warm green Christmas.

If we could achieve this revolutionary little bit of a yuletide makeover, we could boast that we’re cultural colonialism’s victims no more.

Robert F. Sanchez is a retired Miami Herald editorial writer living in Tallahassee, Florida.