He's Making a List -- Umberto Tosi

I was keeping a list, and checking it twice.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair."

One can get sick of being right. Just ask Santa. 

Were he alive today, Charles Dickens might be proud that A Tale of Two Cities, published in 1859, endures as a literary classic. But I suspect he'd be uncomfortable at how much its darkness remains relevant today. 

Not to compare myself with Dickens, or to Father Christmas, or Santa Claus, I feel the same about my holiday novella, "Milagro on 34th Street," published in 2012. I'd glad it remains entertaining. But I regret that it seems to have been more prophetic each year since then. 

The Santa novella mixes my 1990s experiences as a department store Santa, with satire of my favorite holiday movie, "Miracle on 34th Street," particuarly the original 1947 classic staring Edmund Guenn, Maureen O'Hara, and then child actress Natalie Wood. 

(For some people it's snow. I don't feel like it's Christmas until I've watched a rerun of the classic film, and listened to Handel's Messiah.)

Natalie Wood-Edmund Guenn

After my long shifts at Macy's San Francisco department store, listening to toddlers' dreams while sweating under hot lights in my velvet Kris Kringle costume. 

I observed - and frankly was surprised by the goodness I encountered in so many children who were brought to see Santa. Instead of toys, many asked Santa to help neighbors and family members - a job for dad, recovery for a sick mom or a sibling.  

The classic film is positive as well, but more about childhood imagination. The story rails against the commercialization of Christmas. 

It doesn't mention immigration or racism, part of our reality in 1947, but in the background. It's in our faces now - particularly in the form of heavy-handed Trump regime policies that include family seperation, torture prisons, disregard for legal rights and victimization of children, as not-so-jolly St. Nick observes, putting the Trump regime on his beyond naughty, evil-doer's list. 

It's worse that we could have imagined now, reminscent of the WW2 internment of Japanese Americans and of Nazi Germany. Immigration control provides cover for government-sanctioned, mass arrests, concentration camps, separation of families, violations of children rights and other widespread, race-based abuses. 

And barely concealed by this rotting cloak of Fascist hatred, lurks the greed of those who profit from it all - the tax-paid, private prison industrial complex and the low end employers who benefit from their workers being intimidated and unorganized.  

It doesn't seem to matter - so far - that Santa and a majority of Americans, and people worldwide are  appalled, that these measures have fallen far from popular favor by millions of Americans marching and blowing whistles. 

Seeing all his makes it difficult to keep faith with Martin Luther King's  hopeful adage. "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

I'm glad that back in 2012 when MAGA's anti-immigrant depravity I had the foresight to pledge my "Milagro" royalties to the human rights championing American Civil Liberties Union, an early distributor of those warning pamphlets. 

People are easily fooled by con artists and agents of chaos. But most of us have memories -- though too often dormant.We have it in us to remember, see and rise up. 

Societies evolve, hopefully past fear and loathing. I've seen the ultra-Italian family of my boyhood evolve into a blended rainbow through marriage and time. We'd shop in Boston's very Italian North End where one didn't need to speak English. 

My mother told of being attacked and called a "guinea wop" for wearing pierced earings in grade  school. 

"Wop" by historian Salvatore John LaGumina tells the sorry story that too many of so many now priveleged, once-persecuted folks seem to have forgotten.

"Wop," by the way, once was code for "without papers," implying that Italians, who came to America for work," were considered "illegals" whether or not they were. 

American pop culture fell in love with Sophia Loren and deeped Italians cool when Frank Sinatra won an Oscar for his memorable role in From Here to Eternity. 

It's time for all us from privileged ethnic backgrounds to remember our history. 

It wasn't that long ago when, as I recall from  childhood, American laws limited immigration by ethnicity and race. People from many Asian, African and Latin American countries were sharply limited, or banned outright, as were southern Europeans (including Spanish, Italians and Greeks) and Middle Easterners. 

These laws were abolished by the 1960s, but today America's jingo chief exec issued dubious orders banning immigrantion from what he calls "shit hole countries" with impunity.

One of my four daughters is Mexican on her mother's side. Two of them had a Blackfoot Native American grandfather. We have become a family of mixed, Italian, Irish, Latino, German and God knows what heritages. One of my grandaughters married into a Mexican family in California. Their todler daughters are mixed Italian, Mexican and Scottish. They are growing up bilingual. I live in one of Chicago's most diverse neighborhoods, a lovely stretch along Lake Michican. We're 21st-centuryAmericans.

"Santa is watching," read a protest sign held by a demonstrator in front of a detention center here in my hometown of Chicago under the Trump regime's illegal, racist seige of American cities in the name of curbing immigration. 

Our tree trunks and lamp poles are plastered with signs that spell out people's legal rights when attacked by ICE and other immigraton police who regularly kidnap people, including American citizens, hold them without trial, solely of the bases of having been heard speaking Spanish or having dark skin, and working jobs commonly held by immigrants. 

Santa is taking notes. Indeed.

Jesus too. "For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me." - Matthew 25:35-40.

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Umberto Tosi is the author of Sometimes Ridiculous, Ophelia Rising, Milagro on 34th Street and Our Own Kind. His stories have been published in Catamaran Literary Reader and Chicago Quarterly Review where he is a contributing editor. He was a staff writing for Forbes magazine, covering the Silicon Valley 1995-2004. Prior to that, he was a section editor and staff writer for the Los Angeles Times and Sunday magazine, West. He was also the editor of San Francisco Magazine and Diablo Magzine and a contributing writer for the San Francisco Examiner. He has written more than 500 articles and stories for newspapers and magazines, online and in print. He joined Authors Electric in May 2015 and has contributed to several of its anthologies, including Another Flash in the Pen and One More Flash in the Pen. He has four adult children. He resides in Chicago. (Umberto3000@gmail.com)