I try to stay away from politics, but…..I was at the Frankfurt book fair and you know, everything is different in Europe. Sometimes better different, sometimes not. Questionable were these St Nicklaus chocolates. Here, they celebrate two Christmases (I know, it makes your head spin doesn’t it?). Anyway, so they have St Nicklaus on Dec 5 and then the “regular” Christmas on Dec 25. More loot, more stress. Hmmm, not sure that works out well. Anyway, St Nicklaus lives in Spain with his sidekick, Zwarte Pete (Black Pete) and his donkey. I was in a grocery store last week and noticed the holiday stuff is out, including chocolates that portray Zwarte Pete.
Now, I have to ask myself – if this happened in the states what would we do? Would we chalk it up to tradition or would there be riots, picketing and a special session of Congress to enact legislation to prevent chocolate makers from making “racially specific chocolate” Remember what happened with Mexican Barbie? Sheesh. We’ve pretty much legislated ourselves to death over here. Take a look and let me know what you think.
It’s silly, really, but I’m sure somebody out there would be more than willing to make much ado about nothing. Because frankly, this is nothing. Why on earth would a company not want to market their product directly to certain ethnic or racial groups and what is wrong with that? Here there would be some overly sensitive group ready to make waves over it just to rally up their sponsors and justify their existence. This awful habit of crying out over every little thing that comes out and force a political angle to it is what has created this contentious behavior in Washington, where it is no longer possible to even negotiate positions to arrive at a compromise.
Cute little chocolates, by the way. 😉
I completely agree, it’s totally ridiculous and has gotten to some insane level where we’re really legislated ourselves into a corner. and PS the chocolates were FAB 🙂