Santa Is Not Pleased

Keeping a list...

Ho, ho, not to worry. Kris Kringle will still bring gifts for children everywhere. But I hate to report that we adults in America have made this year's naughty list in blackest ink. A majority of us will find a lump of coal in our Christmas stockings. The lump will be orange, slimy and smell bad and be called a Trump. I'll not name names. You know who you are, and so does this season's frowny Father Christmas. 

It's not party politics or the finer points of trade that have our Elf-in-Chief in a snit this Christmas. It's the summary, mass roundups of aliens that our doddering Don has already set in motion. Like under his first term, it includes separation of families and incarceration of children - by the millions this time. Hate based cruelty is not a byproduct here. It is the self-professed point. It doesn't take an all-knowing Santa to recognize this pogrom for what it is - persecution, with holocaust looming. 

Christmas celebrates the birth of baby Jesus to parents who were fleeing persecution. It is a good time for all - especially those who profess Christianity, and those voters who put this clique in charge - to decide whether they will stand by like the "good Germans" of the Third Reich, and watch their leaders commit atrocities in their country's name.

Santa is more than a commercial icon - at least we hope so. The Jolly Elf we know from stories and legend is a compulsive do-gooder. So much so that his jolly helpers, from sidewalk bell-ringers to department store thrones, often feel the pressure to somehow deliver on Yuletide's promise good will to all. 

I felt that altruistic pull during the half-dozen seasons that I worked as a department store and party Santa, red outfit, white beard, bells and all. I discovered that not every kid would ask me for new toy. Many of them proffered profoundly generous wishes that I could gently encourage but not fulfill. 

The kids of all ages would ask me, as Santa, to make a parent get well, or find a job, to help a sibling with a disability, or for help with school, sports or music lessons, help them make friends. I melded my hired Santa experiences into a holiday novella, Milagro on 34th Street - titled with a Latin twist after my favorite holiday movie, Miracle on 34th Street. 

My Milagro is about a struggling department store Santa who develops a Kris Kringle complex. 

 Natalie Wood & Edmund Gwen

He is challenged by a wee, Spanish-speaking brother and sister who plead with Santa to find and return their missing mother. It turns out that the mother has been detained as an alien and is about to be deported. 

I had no idea that my holiday story would be prophetic when I wrote it back in 2012. (I did - and still do, however - donate its Holiday season royalties to the ACLU for its diligent legal work on behalf of migrants.) 

I wish it were not so that my novella foreshadowed the first Trump Administration's much criticized, mass mistreatment of aliens. The prospects an unfettered Trump regime this time around feared much worse.

Much worse all the way around! Oppressive governments, and threats of persecution, only make writers redouble their efforts. This includes yours truly. But we keep hoping for the best as we prepare for the worst. 

In the words of the great Toni Morrison: "There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal."

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Cover by Eleanor Spiesss-Ferris

Umberto Tosi's recently published books include the highly praised, Frank Ritz, Hollywood noir detective mystery The Phantom Eye, plus his story collection, Sometimes Ridiculous, plus Ophelia Rising, High Treason, Sports Psyching and Our Own Kind. His short stories have been published most recently in Catamaran Literary Reader and Chicago Quarterly Review where he is a contributing editor.

 His nonfiction essays and articles have been published widely in print and online. He began his career at the Los Angeles Times as a staff writer and managing editor for its prize-winning, Sunday magazine, West. 

He went on to become editor of San Francisco Magazine. and managing editor of Francis Coppola's City of San Francisco. He joined Authors Electric in May 2015 and has contributed to Another Flash in the Pen and One More Flash in the Pen. He has four adult daughters. He resides in Chicago.

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Enjoy my Hollywood noir detective thriller: The Phantom Eye (a Frank Ritz Mystery)  - soon to be followed by Oddly Dead and Death and the Droid.
 "Tosi writes with tremendous style and a pitch perfect ear for everything that makes the classic noir detective story irresistible. Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer, make room for Frank Ritz!" - Elizabeth McKenzie, best-selling author of The Portable Veblen.