While we're talking about jail birds...

I'm sure everyone is aware William Sydney Porter spent three years in a Columbus Ohio, federal penitentiary in the late 1890s.  Porter, who most people will better recognize by the pen name (no pun intended) O. Henry, embezzled $4000 (other sources suggest $1000) from an Austin, Texas bank (where he held a $100/month teller job), having initially fled to Honduras to avoid trial.

William Sydney Porter with his wife and daughter around the time
he began stealing funds from the First National Bank in Austin, Texas

His wife's illness convinced him to return to the United States and face the music, but things were not exactly going swimmingly in Central America (claims of acquiring a fruit farm notwithstanding, he found employment mostly as a manual laborer during his six month stay).

So let's all lift a glass this holiday season to the ex-con American who coined the term "Banana Republic" and wrote the most famous Christmas story this side of the Atlantic, one that everyone proclaims as their absolute favorite yet no one remembers the poignant details of, save for the female half of the destitute duo selling her hair.

Note further that "magi" is the plural of "magus", a member of a caste of ancient priests/sorcerers from Persia.  Note also that Mr. O essentially denigrated their gifts to the baby Jesus near the end of the story with the throwaway line: "Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication." 

Note finally that a December 1988 episode of Saturday Night Live included a sketch of another pair of New Yorkers, Donald and Ivana Trump, selling valuable reciprocal properties to buy reciprocally-useless trinkets to adorn them.  The notion that President Trump has only recently been exposed to unfriendly media barbs (and is thus incapable of handling them) may be the most frivolous whip-crack of all.