Did Sia Hide a Race Fetish In-Joke in an Xmas Video?
The controversial pop powerhouse may have woven a tasteless gag into her classic holiday touchstone.
Sia’s 2017 holiday album Everyday is Christmas has some serious staying power. Not only did her song “Snowman” get a new video a good three years after it came out, but an expanded deluxe album has just now been released, to mark the fifth anniversary of its debut.
There’s also the lead single “Santa’s Coming for Us” and its cult classic, mega quirky music video (like 50 million views and counting!): alongside child actors from Stranger Things and It, parents Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard prepare a party and get visited by grandparents Henry Winkler and Susan Lucci, before Santa J.B. Smoove comes down the chimney and everybody ends up doing a big old dance off.
But, could you believe that the video’s perfect white mommy actually has a race fetish and has been getting with Kris Kringle?
It’s not 100% for sure, but there’s 5 big reasons that there might be more here than meets the eye…
1. Sia has an absurd and obscene sense of humor.
If anything, Sia’s offbeat and dark “Chandelier” is about problem drinking. She’s also said she wrote her song “Breathe Me” that helped close out Six Feet Under the night of a suicide attempt.
With humor and life in general, too, Sia can be out-of-left-field and sexually transgressive. She twerked in a Tiger King parody music video that namechecked meth and prominently featured phallic imagery. She’s also told Howard Stern that her rehab higher power is “called ‘Whatever Dude’ and he’s a queer, surfing Santa that’s a bit like my grandpa.” On top of all that, she recently revealed that she’s been shilling NFTs under a Twitter alt account @BiancaMedici69.
Got the vibe?
Back during the album release, critics like at the New Yorker found it odd that “Sia Surrenders to Christmas”. But, what if she didn’t, entirely? Hiding a dirty joke as a Christmas video Easter egg is totally something Sia would do.
2. What’s up with the conspicuously multiracial family?
Those child actors who play all the kids? Well, one is Caleb McLaughlin from Stranger Things, a lone black face among a very white family.
You can tell he’s actually a kid in the family and not some random friend who’s visiting because of the way he interacts with the grandparents – which raises the question, where’d he come from, anyways?
You could say adoption or color-blind casting, but the most obvious answer is that the white mommy’s been sleeping with the black Santa.
Santa’s shifty and steals stuff when no-one’s looking, so he would probably be down to cuckold Dax. If you watch Kristen Bell and J.B. Smoove in the background of the dance off, too, you’ll also see the two of them looking a little too comfortable together, where she’s got her arm around her husband but is paying attention to Santa, who shakes his finger at her twice.
And, the people in the video world are so happy and doofy, it’s not like they’d be putting two and two together with even the most prominent results of an affair.
3. There’s a ton of double entendres.
When Kristen Bell sings about writing away to Santa, her lines about “secret wishes” and “hoping all your wildest dreams come true” overlap with J.B. Smoove coming down the chimney and bursting into the living room to her ecstatic welcome.
And her opening words? “Nights are getting shorter now/ hot chocolate…”, where a puzzlingly placed pause creates one perfect lingering moment so it’s like the mommy’s fixating on Santa’s skin and saying “come hither” to her Yuletide lover. Then, of course, since it’s a double entendre, the song continues on and picks up the G-rated thought again with “…fills the air and Christmas cheer does too.” But, we get what she’s saying.
Don’t forget the hors d’oeuvres Kristen Bell perkily prepares, either. One of them is a very memorable mini tree of, ahem, sausages.
If you want to go there, too, you can always take a second look at the song’s somewhat strange title, which has an ominousness paralleling the child actors’ monster movie bona fides, not to mention a possibly bit more perverted sense.
4. A black-and-white twist on a red-and-green celebration wouldn’t be out of the blue.
Yeah, a music video scenario that builds in an affair can seem a little weird, but it’s not like it’s coming from nowhere.
“I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” put naively-perceived sex in Christmas a while back, and this just goes a little further by adding in adultery with a “love ‘em and leave ‘em” Lothario who pops in once a year.
And, spicing up a lame white world is kind of the whole spirit of Hairspray – which is kind of like how Sia’s song adds some reggae flavor to Christmas, too.
5. Sia can be tone deaf with sensitive political topics.
After the long overdue reckonings of 2020, a music video with a race fetish punchline doesn’t seem like the best idea, but to be fair, it wasn’t a great idea in 2017, either.
Sia’s not the most on-top-of-it person, though, politically-speaking. Despite claims of thoughtful consultations and attempts to fill non-stereotypical roles with various actors who are trans or on the autism spectrum, her 2021 debut film Music got pilloried for casting her alter ego Maddie Ziegler as the lead autistic character. Some footage was so controversial that the movie had to insert a warning and be recut. In the aftermath, Sia admitted to both ableism and nepotism, quit Twitter for a time, and relapsed so badly that she needed rehab, only pulling out of it with the help of Kathy Griffin. And, even though she supported FKA Twigs and called out Shia LaBeouf for abusiveness, that doesn’t mean she can’t go wrong elsewhere, especially in attempts at the questionable and boundary-pushing humor to which she’s prone.
So is a race fetish gag there or not? Double entendres always have a level of plausible deniability, but taken all together, the casting, background interactions, and various strange little details all seem a bit too much for coincidence. And, although it’s not clear what would turn up in hard-to-access storyboards and production correspondence, the role of deeply-embedded lyrics and melody in what seems like a pretty tasteless joke makes Sia’s involvement very likely. That’s not even to mention how she’s a bit of a stickler who reportedly scolded Adele for “lazy” lyrics and so probably wouldn’t let something like the disjointed “hot chocolate” line slide through, and especially not as part of the opening words of the lead single on her first album for Atlantic.
Who knows, in trying to put one over on the spirit of the season, Sia may well have given into her worst tendencies and made another monumental misstep. One can only hope that everyone chooses to act kindly towards her and not do a dogpile online, not least because this was a choice set into motion long ago, and also because it’s Christmas.
Author’s Note: This music video quasi conspiracy theory is one of the most polarizing things I’ve ever written. Some people believe it 73,000,000%, while others think it’s completely off-base – there’s no middle ground. But, I have yet to find a better explanation that makes sense of all the weird little details strewn throughout the song and video. Coincidence and color-blind casting just don’t cut it. And, several people who I bounced these ideas off of not only watched the video critically and came away believers, but gave me more material to boot (the sausage hors d’oeuvres, the “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” angle).