When The Office aired its final Christmas episode on Dec. 12, 2012, the celebration was already a mess. The employees at Dunder Mifflin had forgotten about the annual office Christmas party, and Dwight Schrute forced the group into a traditional Pennsylvania Dutch celebration instead.
That episode, “Dwight Christmas,” later became the focus of a bigger edit. Dwight dresses as Belschnickel, a figure from German folklore tied to Santa Claus, and the story turns when his co-workers object after learning the character is often linked to Zwarte Piet, a sidekick depicted in blackface. Dwight texts the white warehouse worker he had asked to play the role, telling him not to come. Mark Proksch is then briefly seen outside the building, fully dressed as Zwarte Piet and in blackface, reading the message and heading back to his car.
The scene mattered again in 2020, after the death of George Floyd pushed streaming services and studios to reassess older material with racist imagery. The blackface segment was removed from both the Netflix and syndicated versions, and the decision put The Office alongside other comedies that stripped out similar moments from their libraries that year.
Greg Daniels, who helped shape the series, defended the edit as part of the show’s larger purpose. He said The Office is about a group of people trying to work together with mutual respect despite the inappropriate actions of their boss and assistant manager, and that the show used satire to expose unacceptable behavior and deliver a message of inclusion. He called the deleted sequence “hurtful and wrong” and said, “I am sorry for the pain that caused.”
The cut was not isolated. In 2020, several episodes of Scrubs and 30 Rock were also taken down from streaming services for the same reason. Five episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia that include racial humor remain unavailable today, underscoring how far the cleanup of old comedy has gone and how uneven it still is. For The Office, the answer is already on the record: the scene is gone because the people who made the show decided it did not belong anymore.
