A recent Christmas program on PBS featured a production from the Mormon Temple on Temple Square in Salt Lake City, Utah. The thousand-member Mormon Tabernacle Choir and the Mormon orchestra, plus various soloists, dancers, children and audience put on a performance which to my point of view had nothing to do with the real Christmas, the birth of a child born into poverty.
Here amid opulence and glimmer of gold and other riches we heard Tom Brokaw recite the Christmas gospel about Mary and Joseph finding no place among the rich and affluent living in “the inn.”
I find that the story is told again and again today when we exclude the Marys and the Josephs from decent housing and health care. To tell the story with fanfares of trumpets and rounding sounds of drums neglects the real story prevalent among us today.
One thing which stood out as the camera scanned the choir of a thousand was that there were only two members of color. Two! I did not see any of color in the orchestra. There might have been. I could not tell. But the fact that only two black people were present in the production gives a new meaning to I’m dreaming of a White Christmas!
Though the song was not featured in the Mormon Tabernacle production, it might as well have been and interpreted with this new twist!
Jake Hjorth
Grand Marais
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