Christmas 2025

For the past 60 years, I have been sending out a Christmas message to as many people as I had addresses for. But now that I am almost 97 and have just moved into Assisted Living at Casa Celeste in Seminole, Florida, I am fighting the temptation to “fageddaboudit,” as they used to say in Boston when I was a kid. Or, as my father used to say during the last few years I went home for Christmas, “Well, this will be my last Christmas.” Then he died at 94.

So, in case this is my last Christmas, I’d hate to deprive you all of the pleasure of hearing from me one more time. I remember well that the first thing my father would read in the daily Boston Globe was the obituaries. How I loved my dad—or “Puppa,” as we all called him. He would be 135 today, and he worked very hard to make this damn country much better than it was when he arrived here at age 14 in 1904. Thank God I.C.E. wasn’t around then, or I wouldn’t be writing this letter. But there was no illegal immigration then. As long as you didn’t have an incurable disease, they let you in, and you built the damn country with your bare hands and a pick and shovel up on the dirt roads of Maine.

Now you can guess where this Christmas message is going. This is a country of immigrants, starting with the Pilgrims, who in 1620 landed in Plymouth—about 30 miles from the pier in Boston where that young kid from Sicily landed. The natives didn’t really like the Pilgrims, who in turn didn’t like the Irish, who in turn didn’t like the Italians, who in turn didn’t like the Poles. But we married each other, and love somehow won—more or less. And their kids are really beautiful. Just look on my Facebook page and laugh your behind off at their names. They are now into the fifth generation, going on sixth, from Seattle to Florida.

I know we can’t have open borders, but why the reckless cruelty in deporting people as if they were animals? Why can’t we put all that money and manpower into creating a legal system that makes people wait in line so they can be absorbed into our society humanely? It sounds naïve and impossible, but Americans have always found a way when they had the will. Do we, the grassroots, have the will? The leadership won’t do it unless we demand it.

Call me naïve, but on Christmas we celebrate the birth of a Palestinian in an occupied country who was later executed by the government for teaching that people should treat each other as if we are all members of the same family, no matter what party we belong to or how much money or power we have.

I’m going to go on praying to Him, and I hope you will join me in praying for all our fellow Americans so we can together solve a problem that is tearing us apart.

Merry Christmas and Peace in 2026 for You and Yours,

Sal and Peggy Umana