Authors Electric

" 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 ...

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. I t doesn't take an all-knowing Santa to recognize this pogrom for what it is - persecution, with holocaust looming.  Christmas celebrates the birth...

 Happy Holiday from your AE Santa! NOTE: portions re-posted from 2015: Musings of a undercover Santa: The thing about being a writer is that we're forever superimposing narratives onto our experiences, even the most mundane. Of course, to tell stories is human. Writers just get deeper into that stream of consciousness. Our imaginary hypertexts can seem compelling, even brilliant, until we sit down and try to write them coherently with a semblance of style. Then they jackknife, ideas askew as a wrecked train. Although I didn't get around to making a story out of them for a long time, my thirty straight days as a Macy's Department Store Santa Claus in downtown San Francisco were like that – mental voice-over video-cams running the whole time, a multi-dimensional theme park ride that stays with me, a Yuletide LSD trip, during which I teetered on the edge of delusion just to see how far it could go. Writing is a kind of madness, after all. T'was the month before Christmas a...

Santa, in fetching scarlet and white, drops by Chessington World of Adventures When my children became teenagers, they told me something that shattered my illusions about Father Christmas.   Not whether he existed or not – even I knew the answer to that – but what he’s supposed to wear. The traditional red suit with white cuffs matching his snowy beard is apparently not traditional at all, but the result of a cynical advertising campaign by Coca Cola in the 1930s, forever associating the plump, jolly, big-hearted Santa Claus with the fizzy drink. Until then, Santa had boasted a lean, trim figure, clothed in a long, green robe. Well, there was only one answer to that. Utter nonsense. Teenagers think they know everything. Father Christmas/Santa Claus is depicted wearing red because he’s always worn red. Look at Christmas cards, films, book illustrations, department stores (all post 1930s, I admit). My mind flew back to my German childhood in the 1960s … and uncovered a me...