Let’s agree to suspend the barbs until after Christmas.

However, allow me this brief observation — sans criticism — regarding the ethnicity of Jesus Christ and Santa Claus.

The issue surfaced when Fox News talking head Megyn Kelly posited the notion that both Santa Claus and Jesus were white. My first thought: Who cares? My second thought: Why is Kelly even going there?

I have no answer to Thought No. 1. I frankly don’t care about Santa’s ethnicity, other than to remind Kelly and others who do care that the jolly old man — don’t let your kids read this — is a fictional character based vaguely on an actual man. Santa Claus is whatever we want him to be in our household. That’s the beauty of Santa. As Francis Pharcellus Church wrote in that wonderful editorial to Virginia O’Hanlon in the late 19th century, he exists in our hearts.

The stuff about Jesus, though, is a bit more substantial. Anthropologists looking for clues to Jesus’s appearance generally have concluded he was a dark-skinned man who looked very much the way men do in the Middle East. Having spent some time in Israel — five weeks in May-June 2009 — I can say without a doubt that the vast majority of Palestinians and others of Arabic descent have roughly the same look.

Israelis who descended from European immigrants are another matter. Some are blue-eyed blondes, some have dark hair and eyes, others have features in the middle.

And why did Kelly venture this notion — from which she retreated a little — that Santa Claus and Jesus are white men?

One word: ratings.