Every Christmas Day, I like to reminisce about the fabulous, colorful Christmas trees I saw on Michigan Avenue in Chicago in 1978. The sparkling electric light bulbs and multicolored ornaments on the trees in the streets and inside shop windows were dazzling and fabulous.

If you have ever had the experience of looking down upon Los Angeles from a descending airplane at night, you must have felt the same awe and adoration that I felt when I saw those Christmas trees. LA’s colorful night scenery is stunningly beautiful when you look down from the sky. If LA’s night view were black and white, it would not be enchanting or awesome at all. Likewise, if the Christmas tree decoration lights I saw in Chicago were monochromatic, they would not be captivating or enthralling, either.

In an American children’s book, “White Cat, Black Cat,” White Cat lives in a black house and Black Cat lives in a white house. When Black Cat visits the White Cat’s house, he cannot be seen because all the backgrounds are black. Likewise, when White Cat visits Black Cat’s house, he, too, cannot be seen because everything is white. Thus, they decide to meet in a colorful place. There, they can finally see each other clearly and thus are overjoyed.

Colorfulness is therefore much better and far superior to simple black and white. The above tale reminds us that if everything were black and white, we would lose half of our vision and thus not see half of our surroundings. Likewise, if our minds are stuck in black and white, our thoughts and perspectives will also be reduced by half.

A foreign national residing in Seoul recently told me that in South Korea, he could see mostly black cars and white cars. There are some silver or beige cars, but cars with other colors are rarely seen. In other countries, colorful cars constantly roll down the streets. The foreign national thinks that this phenomenon may reflect the Korean people’s mindset that tends to divide things by black and white.

Some time ago, when the political correctness movement was at its pinnacle, the leaders of the movement criticized “Merry Christmas!” as a religiously biased greeting that ignores non-Christians. They recommended “Happy holidays!” on Christmas Day, instead. However, Christmas has become everybody’s holiday, including non-Christians.

Since the extreme PC movement tried to ignore colorfulness and diversity in American society, Time magazine once called it, the “Thought Police.” Indeed, pushed to the extreme, the PC movement ends up monitoring and manipulating people’s minds to the point that it degenerates into a dogmatic ideology.

Whenever Christmas comes, the notion of the Christmas spirit, including such important moral lessons as what it means to “forgive and forget,” or to “help needy neighbors,” prevails in many societies. Listening to Christmas carols, people’s minds become full of the Christmas spirit: hatred melts and compassion overflows.

I hope the 2024 Christmas is a colorful one, glittering with generosity and empathy, just like beautifully decorated Christmas trees that gather family members and relatives for the joyous occasion. The song, “White Christmas,” begins with “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas / Just like the ones I used to know.” I would like to sing, “I’m dreaming of a colorful Christmas / Just like the ones I used to know.”

We were not always like this. A long time ago, we lived in a colorful place where we embraced diversity and differences. At that time, we cared for others whom we treated as our neighbors and friends. Sadly, those good old days are gone and now we suspect and detest one another as if we were archenemies.

Looking back upon this year, we realize that we have ruthlessly antagonized those with different opinions, thoughts and ideologies. Especially in our political arena, such a phenomenon has been egregious and ubiquitous. It is a cancerous ailment that has plagued our society.

We hope that in this Christmas season, we can forget our rancor, acrimony and animosity, and care about others including our political foes. We also hope that the Christmas spirit is prevalent in our society and that we can reconcile in harmony and cooperate with each other in order to make a better society. That is what we humans should do.

In the 2004 Hollywood movie “Hellboy,” the protagonist Hellboy is born as an ugly monster, but becomes a hero and the savior of human beings. Eventually, he is even better than humans. At the end of the movie, FBI agent John Myers narrates: “What makes a man a man? Is it his origins? The way he comes to life? I don’t think so. It’s the choices he makes, not how he starts things, but how he decides to end them.”

Although we may have started wrongfully, we can end things beautifully. Surely, that would be the true Christmas spirit.

Kim Seong-kon

Kim Seong-kon is a professor emeritus of English at Seoul National University and a visiting scholar at Dartmouth College. The views expressed here are the writer’s own. -- Ed.