A good few years ago, I used to work in a building across the street from a large and upscale San Antonio mall. I'd often spend my lunch hour there, stretching my legs by walking down to the far end and back. The place (OK, it was Northstar Mall) used to have a larger perportion of stores in it with stuff that I actually could afford, back then, when I worked a corporate-type job. The mall was always gratifyingly crowded, and lavishly decorated and of course - at this time of year there was always a Santa. The mall Santa had an elaborate throne, set against a backdrop, and a line of children all along the edge of the roped-off area. Often the children were dressed in Christmassy clothes, lots of red and plaid. They waited obediently with their parents, and I would stop and think what a pallid and unexciting thing is a civilian Santa Claus, compared to a visit from Santa on a military base.

For Santa doesn't arrive in a sleigh or something wussy like that; he arrives in the back seat of an F-15, or on top of the largest flight-line firefighting engine on base. One year in Spain, we saw Santa sitting in the door of a Huey, landing in the empty field between the O'Club and BX, and the Base Commander almost single-handed trying to keep a breaking wave of excited children from mobbing the helicopter before the blades stopped turning. Military Santa has hair on his chest; he arrives in the largest or noisiest vehicle in the local inventory, whether it flies, rolls, floats or any combination thereof, with a maximum of ceremony and ruckus. Practically everyone with small children is there, any number of commanders, the cameras from AFRTS and the base paper. It's an event; generally the smaller the base, the more important it seems. Only the mailing deadlines for sending packages back to the States got more play.

It's kinda hard for a mall Santa to beat that: no wonder the kids in line at the mall did't seem all that thrilled.