The Senate’s third annual Secret Santa gift exchange (!) was last night, and NPR was a fly on the wall during the unexpectedly un-frosty bipartisan event. Here’s how it works: each participant selects a name out of a hat, thus becoming that person’s ‘Secret Santa’ and procuring for them a small gift of or below an agreed-upon value, in this case $15. The senatorial tradition was spearheaded by Minnesota Senator Al Franken—a Jew, no less, NPR helpfully explains—who this year gave Indiana Democrat Joe Donnelly a hand-drawn map of the United States marked with important events in Donnelly’s life.
“There’s been a lot of controversy about the ethnicity of Santa lately,” Franken told NPR, referring to Fox News host Megyn Kelly’s bizarre insistence that Santa—a purely fictional character, I should emphasize (sorry, kids)—is unequivocally a white man. “And maybe, you know, he’s Jewish. He could be Jewish.”
Your move, Fox News.
Stephanie Butnick is chief strategy officer of Tablet Magazine, co-founder of Tablet Studios, and a host of the Unorthodox podcast.