Is this the way a submission for criticism is made?
This an excerpt from a letter written by a Mall Santa
I am a full bearded Santa, six feet tall, real leather boots and a four inch wide belt. Fur trim on wool and satin suit, it is custom made, a velvet wide fur trimmed hat decorated with a line of bells down the whole length. My white Beard goes half way to my belt and a heavy gold ring set with a red carnelian is put on over my white gloves. I have small old Saint Nick glasses perched on my nose and I am the very picture of intelligence and wit.
My eyes see clearly and they do look directly into yours. I am not a heavy man although I am physically tall. I am an ex-Marine Major ,long retired ,and I run two miles a day where I live in the mountains.
I have lived all over the world and my work in the Marines was with Intelligence Liason. As the very vision of Santa Claus I work at being Santa all year round. I do the Malls at Christmas time and I make $60,000 a year. I also do Charity work and spots on local television, I also help sell advertising to merchants to be used during the Holidays. I can do these things 365 day a year.
But the job does have its limitations…this is a story about one five week period at a Mall.
I had to go to the bathroom and could not be allowed to go very far from the Santa Claus “set” in the Mall . I ate one meal in the Food Court the first day and it was something I never repeated. I drew crowds everywhere. Impossible crowds, Santa can not eat in front of people, they twitter all around you in a circle like the damned around the light.
After that one meal, I had to have Meals brought to me and water supplied to me constantly, I ate alone behind closed doors in a marble Palace in a wing of the Mall still under construction. But "calls of nature" had to be close-by and STARBUCKS was only a few paces in front of the set where we did the photography. I used their bathroom to check my costume and face and cooled off a moment from the impossible demands of heat while wearing a Santa outfit under photography lights . The Mall provided a fan, which made a great difference in my ability to last through the day. But the fan blew the children's hair during photo shoots so I did not always derive much good from a fan since it was not aimed at me. The heat was constant, my sweat was soaking my inner shirt. And by the end of the day I was drained...literally.
But to begin my story. I had fled for a half hour of noon break( 1:30-2:00) to the back of STARBUCKS. I was able to sit for a moment in the back of STARBUCKS like at the back of a tunnel, in full view from inside, but not from the mobs outside filling the Mall with shoppers intent on what the Christmas Season entails in a Mall. The Starbucks staff were protective and understanding. They gave me water regularly and "red-eye" espressos to keep me intent when I was so weary with the long hours and the often almost unbearable heat. I owed every single child I saw my full attention, I did my best to have a fresh face and an intent mind for every child. My biggest fear was a snap of temper. I was truly afraid of being anything but Santa. Starbucks was essential to maintaining my ability to function and do a good job. I depended on them and was very grateful to them.
While I was sitting in STARBUCKS in my noon break sometime in the second week all the way in the back at the last table crouching there in my Santa sweats like a cornered and harried animal, slinking in the shadows with an espresso in my fist next to the bathroom door...a young girl came down the long length of the room like something coming down a tube to the back of my hole. She was about thirteen years old at my guess, still almost a child...just a beginning teenager. Perhaps she was seventh grade. She stopped just out of reach from my table and , believe me, I did not want to talk to this girl, I didn't want anyone to crowd me or communicate with me. I wanted to hide in the back and drink my caffeinerich espresso and shiver in crippled solitude for just a moment. And this thirteen year old girl had come to corner me. If I had known who and what she was I would have run, Kat. I had no idea who and what she was. But if I had known I might have fled.
She was dressed like all the other girls her age in the Mall , a little bodice and tight trousers and her hair pulled back tightly in a ponytail, and done with some kind of device at the back of her head, I do not know what girls call those things. I am over sixty and I don't pay much attention to girls of any age anymore.
She stopped just out of reach and leaned forward as if she were standing on the edge of a cliff with her arms thrown back stiffly , very like a hood ornament on a Rolls Royce, and tremblingly behind her as if to balance lest she fall while she leaned across some abyss that separated herself from me. It was as if she were standing on a cliff and she had to reach across some open gulf between us...as if I were hanging in the air just out of reach instead of what I was ,crouching in a shadow in my velvet and red wool with an espresso and a hunted look, like the Jack Palance gunman in the movie Shane.
And in a trembling and stuttering little girls voice she said "I w -want a D -dreedle for Christmas." And I looked at her face and I looked at her features and I looked at her soul and I went into her eyes.
"I w -want a D -dreedle for Christmas."
She was a Jewish kid, thirteen year old female...a Cassandra psychological archtype if I ever saw one.
She was one of those precocious pubescent females who were used down through history by priests as little prophetesses. Cassandra of Troy, daughter of King Priam, is the model. The temples of the god Apollo at Delphi and the goddess Artemis at the Temple of Bassae in the Pellopenese also employed the type. Girls of this type are used in Haiti today as voices for the spirits. Virgins, on the edge of adulthood ,but still girls. Cassandras. Tiny little breasts, small even features, she was elven tall and tiny and pert in appearance.
Only this Cassandra was a just barely teenage Jewess. And she was standing before me and she had no comprehension of what was moving inside her except that the psychological pressures were driving her to the edge of a cliff which only she could see and feel. And the girl was leaning across some gulf to speak to another archtype who was dressed as a Christian saint who had been dead for eighteen centuries, from a religion which was not her own.
What was she REALLY saying, Kat? What was she, a little Jewish girl only 13 years old, really saying to "Santa Claus" half in the dark at the back of a STARBUCKS in a crowded Mall in a region where maybe fifty percent of the population was Jewish and this wasn't their holiday, but was more powerful than theirs, more culturally dominant than their Channukah...or for that matter more powerful than the Muslim Ramadan which ended about this time also and never stood a cultural chance compared to Christmas which blared all around them from every source. Nothing blares like Christmas.
"I w -want a D -dreedle for Christmas." What was she really saying to me, this old tall fraud of a Santa with a cup of espresso and a stupid hat? How would YOU have handled this, Kat. What would you have said to this child? Quick, give me an answer, you don't have time to think. And neither did I. Things like this happen like lightening and you don't have time to think.
Do you know what a Dreedle is, Kat? If you had to go get a Dreedle where would you go?
During Channukah the Jews have a custom for children and old grandmothers, usually, to play together. They have a small toy top with Jewish alephbeit written in the 4 sides of the top, NUN,GIMMEL,HAY,SHIN ( the letters also have numerical value and stand for the anagram letters in the hebrew phrase A MIRACLE HAPPENED IN THIS PLACE)...the toy top is called a Dreedle ( pronounced DRAY-doll).
The top is spun and if the numbers come down favorably ,then the child is rewarded with a small yellow candy often shaped like a coin, but also candies wrapped in yellow paper or lemon gumdrops. It is a traditional thing associated with the Feast of Channukah...it has NOTHING to do with Christianity or with Santa Claus. Candy stores at Channukah time often sell a box of appropriate candies and many also sell a Dreedle with the candy.
But many Jewish matrons in a family have a handmade Dreedle used every year for the children and the oldest woman, the old grandmother is usually the one who plays this game with the children. Are you familiar with the eight days of Channukah?
There are lots of habits in old festivals associated with religious holidays that predate the religions themselves…dreedles are one of these.
In Eastern Europe there was an old "wise woman" in tradition perhaps with connotations of a witch called Belfana who corresponds to this Jewish persona and in some Eastern European areas where Jewish populations were forcibly converted to Christianity centuries ago by persecution and war...Belfana is cast more in the role of Santa Claus. She brings the gifts of Christmas presents flying on a broomstick and not the male Santa. There are places in the world in isolated areas like the mountains of Hungary for instance where Belfana is the Earth Mother of Life rather than Santa who is the Sky Father's representative. The competition between Earth Mother and Sky Father still exists in some places and the traditions on which such things are founded may go back ten thousand years. In some places Goddesses ruled men's lives, not gods. The dreedle itself has a feminine quality as an object...it is shaped like a female womb. I have even seen some with handles that suggested fallopian tubes at the styled top of the toy.
What is this little Jewish girl really saying to me ?
"I w -want a D -dreedle for Christmas." And it is spoken across an impossible mental gulf to a male representative of the Sky Father...in a totally subconscious communication from a little virgin Cassandra. A little sensitive almost teenage Jewess speaking to a Christian…to Santa Claus.
What would you have done, Kat?
Would you even have understood it? Do you even understand what I am writing now?
This young Jewish girl was taking a lot of courage to come up to me privately and address me. She didn’t understand herself what she was saying or why she was saying it..but she was exhibiting a very real distress and I think it was psychological and had a lot to do with her capacity not only as a Jew but as a virgin sensitive…a Cassandra.
A Dreedle is a symbol from the Old Religion in Europe from before the time of modern religions like Christianity and Judaism. The Dreedle is a womb toy..a symbol like an egg that is spun around and leads to "sweet rewards" and is the domain of old women and little children. It is not associated primarily with males. The spinning of the Deedle is an allusion to sexual procreation. It is an add-on custom to Channukah from a much earlier time …a prehistoric time when the Old Religion still had power, the occult world of magic and the seasons of the Earth Mother and the goddesses who sacrificed living men to the Full Moon…to Artemis.
Have you ever heard of the Old Religion festivals of Beltane and Samhein? Have you ever heard of the legend of the Twelfth Night or of Belfana riding her broom to deliver gifts, just as Santa Claus is said to ride in the air at night to do the same thing? Dreedles come from Belfana and Beltane. Have you ever heard of Belzebub? Same religion, the Old Religion.
Sexuality is a fabric constituant in all religions…but it is especially explicit in the Old Religion. Witches Sabbats were gatherings of the worshippers of the Old Religion. This girl does not understand what she is saying out loud with her demands. She doesn’t know that it is her subconscious that has pushed her here.
“I w-want a D-dreedle for Christmas?”
What is she asking for? She doesn’t know, she doesn’t even know why she is constrained to ask. All she knows is that she is female, thirteen years old and Jewish confronting a male Santa Claus and demanding I give her a Jewish Channukah symbol on a Christian Holiday. Go figure? Is she saying she wants a womb for Christmas…security is a womb. She is obviously in some insecurity. Her face and her motions say that. Or is this a sexual challenge..many challenges have sexual elements. Put up or shut up. Go for your gun.
What is happening here?
She is speaking to me from her subconscious. And she is unknowing of this fact ,but nevertheless also quite urgent in her demand. She is demanding. She is shouting at me to give her a “Dreedle”.
She is a Jewish child asking for something for Christmas. I am the one who gives children gifts at Christmas…but she is Jewish…not Christian. And she is also not quite a child either. She knows I am just a man in a red suit and unlike the wide eyed four year olds she undoubtedly knows I am completely without power and authority of any kind to actually provide anything…. except illusions.
A Dreedle. A toy top used in the Channukah festival, a symbol of Channukah itself right along with the Latkes and the Menorah. And a sexual symbol of the female womb.
I looked at her and I said, “Tell me your name?” She is standing on some mental cliff urgent and almost beside herself at doing what she is demanding.
“Tell me your name.”
I have to return her to the real world. And also like an exorcist I have to have her name herself. “Sit down here, with me.”
“What is your name?”
“Rachel.”
“Well, Rachel, my name is Nicholas, people call me Santa Claus.”
I held up two fingers over my head and motioned for the Starbucks waiter to bring me two Espressos. I pointed at the girl and she sat down and about ten seconds later the pair of espressos were in front of us served by the attentive staff who were aware of me all the time. I asked the girl,” Rachel, would you like sugar or cream?’ I wanted to make her sit and establish a moment of social communication and trust. Two Espressos. And I fixed hers as she expressed, sugar and cream.
The girl had calmed down a bit, I had taken her away from the precipice and now she was sitting across from me at the tiny dim table drinking a very fine Starbucks Espresso.
“ A Dreedle is a toy top used in the sixth night of Channukah, isn’t it, Rachel?”
“Yes, it is, do you know things about Channukah, Santa?”
“Not as much as you do, Rachel, I am sure, but I know that it celebrates being Jewish and that it is a memorial festival for the defeat of the Seluecids occupying Army under Antiochus by the patriot Jewish Maccabees about 150 years before Christ, and that it also celebrates that Jews and other faiths can share and live side by side with one another. I know that it involves acts of charity to the poor and to children and eating latkes potato cakes, and giving gifts and is a very family oriented time for Jewish people and that it is eight days long and involves lighting a menorah with successive candles each night of the cycle and that it co-incides closely in time with the Christmas Holiday of Christians. Am I correct?”
Rachel sipped her Espresso and nodded at me and smiled. She was pleased I knew about Channukah.
So far, so good.
“Rachel, do you feel that Christmas is in competition with Channukah in any way?”
The child looked up at me and nodded her head slightly and replied, “Sometimes.”
“Rachel, do you feel sometimes that Christmas is stronger than it should be and that Santa and the things of Christmas, all the things we see around us…even myself as Santa, are a little overbearing…that it takes away from how you feel about Channukah?”
Rachel is a smart girl and she knows what I am implying and she nods and smiles over her Espresso. It could have ended right there except for one thing.
God who is a meddler in our human lives did something which made a difference.
It so happened that by coincidence I had bought a box of Channukah Chocolates for a Jewish goldsmith named James Feldman, who had twin sons named Jacob and Michael, the day before, and since I knew he already had a Dreedle which was made of gold and inlaid with enamel as a family heirloom, I took the cheap ceramic Dreedle off the package before I mailed it to him and dropped the little Dreedle into my pocket. That Dreedle was in my pocket just by chance at that very moment. I had mailed the package to him that morning.
While Rachel sipped her Espresso I reached into my Santa woolen pants and took out the dreedle concealed in the palm of my hand. While she sat there I took the dreedle and spun it on the tabletop seemingly out of nowhere. You should have seen the girls eyes go wide. She sat the small cup of espresso down so that a bit of it spilled. I caught the dreedle in my hand before it stopped spinning on the tabletop. The dreedle disappeared into my hand. Rachel’s eyes snapped onto mine and I looked into her eyes.
“There is no such thing as coincidence where God is concerned, Rachel. I think you asked for precisely the right thing and that God, not Santa, is giving it to you now. Try to understand what God wants from you, and be proud of being Jewish and not concerned with Christian noises. “ And then I stood up and as I did so I caught Rachel by the hand and put the dreedle into her hand as I turned and walked back out to the set and again took my place in the furnace in front of the camera and the long line of children.
I considered the matter ended, Rachel had gotten her reassurance of being Jewish and gotten a blessing on her sexuality at the same time, but I admit I too was a bit in awe of how God had given me precisely what the girl had asked of me. But in all faith I know God to be like that and did not trouble myself further with His intentions in the matter.
But for Rachel the matter was still something that needed further attention , but then children often do not know enough to leave well enough alone. I have never been a believer in prolonged contact with God. My advice to anyone who meets God is to keep the meeting brief ....and don’t look back.
But I was going to see Rachel again, whether I Iiked it or not.
In the continuing week I often looked up during the day and saw Rachel out there in the crowd, somewhere on the edges usually, not trying to be apparent. But she would be there every day at some time or another. Indeed, the Mall provided sofa chairs and alcoves of such were all around the perimeter of my Santa set and the promenades of the Mall for the comfort of the many retired people, many of them Jewish I expect, since this wealthy area is where everyone seems to come to retire....and die.
Rachel was not trying to catch my attention. But she was ubiquitous and circling in those days of the third and fourth week.
I was in Starbucks again one noon taking my break when she confronted me again. I was sitting in the front this particular day drinking a cold mint chocolate Frappachino with whipped Cream. Starbucks had two front windows and had placed sofas near each so that patrons could look out into the Mall while they indulged in the caffeine they enjoyed from the fine Starbuck’s menu. I sat there visibly to draw customers into Starbucks while maintaining myself behind the protective glass and many people who passed were smiling at me and waving while many others were coming inside to do business for Starbucks. My presence encouraged that. Starbucks knowing this also , gave me my Frappacino for free.
I looked up and it was Rachel outside the window staring down at me. I made a motion with my eyes for her to come in and sit on the sofa with me. A moment later the small breasted young girl had come through the door and was sitting beside me. I smiled and so did she. I asked her if I could treat her to a chilled coffee and she said yes. All I had to do was raise my hand and since I was practically sitting behind the Starbucks counter already I soon had a sweet chilled coffee for Rachel.
She said, “Santa, I want a cell phone for Christmas.” I laughed outloud and took a sip on my mint Frappacino and smilingly replied,” And you think, Rachel, that because Santa once pulled a dreedle out of his pocket that I will now pull a cell phone out of my pocket for you as well.?”
Rachel giggled and nodded and tilted her head seductively . We were playing a game again. The cell phone wasn’t why she was here except superficially. She was here for something else. But I would play the game. I had begun to like the child.
“Rachel, Santa does not always provide what children ask for.” Rachel makes a flirtatious mock frown. Yes we are playing another game, I think to myself. We are perhaps teasing one another, an excuse for us to be face to face. That is what she wants. She wants to talk to me, to sit with me, to be close to me..the way so many children do. “I love you, Santa Claus.” It is almost as if she is saying this outloud although Rachel is only saying it with her eyes.
So many children snuggle close and say that to me quietly. And I understand, my heart goes out to the children who are not greedy, not demanding, not in such a hurry to state their business which is “getting” not giving. Rachel is one of those, even though she knows that the man sitting with her is not “real”, is not really Santa Claus at all. But still, like so many adults even, my presence is so perfect and my eyes on theirs, that they surrender to me for instants at a time. I represent the Compassion for which the starving souls of even hardened and realistic people yearn. And we all need to pray ,even when it may be and probably is, that there is only darkness to hear our prayers.
“Rachel, there are some things that Santa does not carry in his sleigh.” Again that mock frown from 13 year old Rachel.
“ I do not carry Mercedes or winning Lottery tickets, Rachel. I do not carry Pool Tables or Trampolines. I do not carry Ponies, Puppies or Hamsters, nor do I provide any living pet. And Rachel, I do not “do” cell phones because even if I provided them I could not provide the wherewithal to pay the monthly bills to service them. Have you considered getting a babysitting job or doing part-time work at SUBWAY making sandwiches…they might hire you for enough to pay for a monthly cell phone.”
Rachel looks into my eyes and realizes that I am speaking realistically under the guise of this Santa veil. She knows I am not going to perform any magic, that I am declaring myself to be only a man. I am only dressed as Santa, I am not Santa. I am just a man like other men. This round is over. What have you really come to talk to me about, Rachel?
I do not need to say this, she sees it in my eyes.
Rachel takes a long sip of her sweet chilled coffee and she suddenly looks up into my face and says something only a little child might ask, but her eyes are not the eyes of a child. The child and the woman are both in those eyes looking at me and the question she asks is another conundrum, another thing of hidden meanings. Seductive eyes.
“Santa, how is it possible to fly, how do you fly?”
The question is not asked by a child....it is only veiled by the childish voice. It is a woman asking me this question. What is she really asking me? She knows I am not Santa, she knows I do not fly. She knows that Santa is only an illusion and she is asking me a nonsense question and looking at me with a woman’s eyes. A child might ask this question and get a child’s answer, but Rachel is a little woman…I can see it in her look and the intensity of her awareness. It is a woman asking me this question, not a child. Yet it is a child’s question.
Tell me, Kat, what do you see?
Rachel’s subconscious is again speaking and her Cassandra is apparent. This is serious ground.
“Flying” is another allusion for sexuality. Flying in dreams is often accompanied by the sense of being naked. Witches in the old grimoires would strip naked and smear themselves with an ointment which contained seminal fluids and mount their "broomsticks"…and fly. What is hidden in those old folktales from ancient times when witches and mass sexuality consorted with the Horned One on the Sabbats? Rachel’s subconscious is wise and she is not rationally aware of what she is asking…or that I see into her mind to her subconscious Id standing there speaking openly to me face to face. Cassandra indeed….
“Rachel, if I told you how to fly, then Santa would see everyone able to fly, wouldn’t I?” It would not be in Santa’s interest to tell you how to fly, Rachel, now would it?”
“But you know how to fly don’t you, Santa. Santa knows how to fly.”
Rachel is pressing the question, her subconscious senses something in me as a man…Rachel’s Id is questioning me not as Santa..she is also talking to me as a male. Rachel may know what she is asking, at least at some level, this is a different question than the others. Rachel is pressing me to speak as a male…not as Santa. This little Cassandra is a hard opponent, she will blatantly come into whatever rational or moral defenses I throw up and she is sexually demanding again.
Does this child speak in awareness of what she is saying after all? That would be dangerous. I have no liking ,nor need, to speak to a woman on such a matter. “Flying” is not a matter I want to discuss with a 13 year old female. If she wants to know about “flying” let her get a boyfriend. Being a pussy-teaser with Santa is annoying.
I am talking to Rachel with my eyes and she is “talking back”. Instead, to break off the suggestive looks within the contest I say outloud, “Do you know anything about Latin or Greek mythology, Rachel?” If I were to speak in Latin or Greek would you know the words I was using, little girl?”
The question makes Rachel look like I am changing the subject. I continue,” Psychology has many secrets about which you , as a younger person without any studies in the subject, may be unaware.” Rachel looks at me again, she wants me to get to the point and she is waiting.
I can’t treat Rachel in a reasoned form, reason will not touch what she wants. She doesn’t realize it fully, but she does sense enough to know what she is doing has sexual arousal on her part, and that it is blatantly being offered to me. But she is so inexperienced that she can not possibly understand the processes involved in accomplishing a seduction or the consequences of such a thing. Seductions are not about sex anyway, they only use sex as a medium of exchange. Seductions are about Power.
Rachel wants a sexual sense of power. The Dreedle was a symbol…I gave her the symbol ,but not the power. Now she is back, teasing me to show her how to “fly”, she and her subconscious are sexually aroused by a taboo figure in me of Father God or an association with God, and a desire, thinly veiled, of a gauntlet of offered sex. Flying is being discussed, the ecstasy of orgasm is the deeper meaning. Teach me about orgasm, you gave me a womb( dreedle), now I want to talk about filling my womb.
Exstasis.
Exstasis is not a word this little open Cassandra will know nor would she understand it even if I rationally explained it. The ability to levitate brought on my quasi-sexually intense states of Exstasis are not going to be enough for Rachel. Concepts and stories are going to be useless against what Rachel is showing me in herself. “Flying.”
“Rachel, there are many ways to “fly”. There is the conventional way given to us by the Wright Brothers. You are not talking about that kind of flying are you, Rachel, you are talking about something else, aren’t you?” Rachel still sits in silence looking me in the eye very deliberately. She won’t flinch.
The Maiden witch Morgan Lefey’s confrontation with Merlin, the old legends all over again. Magic. The Maiden and the wizard.
( Hello, Clarisse.) This girl’s subconscious is formidable. She has powers ,this child. She knows I have them also. Neither one of us has departed from the modern world yet we both feel the other in that occult way I know, and she now senses also. Shall I speak openly to this child about what she is demanding? Magic, no one believes in magic. This is the modern world and Science has destroyed magic. Where does this girl come asking me for what does not have a place in the modern world, this all so knowing scientific age?
“Stand up, Rachel ,and face the window.” I stand up as she does. I am standing over her and behind her, close behind her. We can both see our reflections in the shadows of the wide plate glass window before us, this small alcove close around us, looking outward at a Mall full of moving people. My face is almost superimposed on hers in the reflections of our forms in the shadowed glass. And we seem both to intimately float upon the face of that glass surface.
Magic is within the mind. And it issues out of the mind like a wind into the reality of day. Magic is born within the mind as an illusion and this illusion is interpreted as REAL by the Mind and then projected upon the outer world. There the intellectual motion of this projection inserts the illusion into the reality of that outer world and makes the illusion live and change the facts of the outer vision. There is an old saying, that we see only what we want to see…or expect to see. Few people see what is actually there. You have to be trained for that. But people can see illusions just as easily, if another stronger mind is trained to project them, and knows how to do so.
And in this way Reality, which can not have being without the mind which contains it , changes the face of the outer world and brings a new face of reality back into the Mind. So this is the mechanism of magic and how it is made real. This is what is always at work in the realms of desires and the occult willingness to believe.
And I am quite capable of such things, little Rachel, and I am also quite capable of hypnotizing you like I hypnotise simple minds all the time. Children go to sleep in my arms with their eyes wide open. A click of my fingers or a flash bulb going off and the picture is taken. I do this over and over every hour of the waking day. Santa is who I am. And your mind is open to mine, as the minds of children have no defenses against my awareness.
As Rachel stares at her reflection and mine superimposed over hers like two lovers fixed one atop the other upon a sexual bed of glass, I reach down into her eyes in the reflection and grip her awareness with mine. I take her mind into mine through her eyes and she leans softly back against me standing behind her and she allows it to be so.
Out in the Mall the crowds, unknowing ,hurry by, but within in the close silence Rachel and I stand close before the reflecting glass each reflection of our forms locked in a mental physics, our eyes penetrating the others in the reflections before us. Rachel submissive and drowsey as she stares.
Sexuality requires that the male penetrate the female physically. I have just entered Rachel’s mind with my own. She is fixed and we have one awareness which I command .
And across the Mall the glass walled elevator, like some bright crystal box, goes upward slowly in its rise from one floor to the next, while the elevator beside it descends.
I reach up with my right hand gently and I place my fingertips, just my fingertips on Rachel’s throat just below her right ear. I stop in the stillness and Rachel closes her eyes and then reopens them with an empty look, she is asleep with her eyes still open. This is first trance. Her subconscious knows what I am. Her subconscious is my ally. Who in the entire world is more "suggestible" than a 13 year old girl? Who is more sensitive to spirits than a Cassandra. And I am dealing with precisely that ideal person.
And across the Mall the glass walled elevator goes upward slowly in its rise from one floor to the next, while the elevator beside it descends. The Mall fountains all around the elevators of glass sprinkle and spurt and trickle in the sunlight of the bright Skylights overhead.
It is Noon, broad daylight. I am perfectly visible to everyone in the court of the Mall. I am perfectly visible and no one sees me standing invisible behind the girl in the glass. Behind me everyone is unaware of me in the distant corner of Starbucks hardly visible. And from there none can see the girl standing close in front of me. If they would look they would only see half my back and little else. No one can see my hand touching Rachel’s carotid artery.
No one knows. And if they did see what would they know? What would they realize they were seeing?
One finger presses against the throat very lightly taking the pulse. I can feel Rachel’s pulse in my fingertip. It is the strongest point for a pulse in the body and extremely intimate. It is not overtly sexual, but the girl is leaning back against me and our forms are superimposed on the glass, her awareness is staring in first trance, and I am in deliberate and firm eye contact.
As long as Rachel’s eyes are locked on mine and she is looking outward through the glass and my eyes on hers in the same glass at the elevator going up and down in the twinkling noon light off the fountain she will be subject to my own mental motion. If I break eye contact she will wake up. I can move her into second trance simply at a touch of my second finger …keeping time on her pulse, a touch in time with her heartbeat. A tapping softly on her throat under her ear in time with her own pulse. Second trance.
There.
The small breasted girl’s eyes never move and neither do mine. No thought will arise and cross her mind as long as I control her pulse with my touch. Thoughts arise and can be blocked. With one finger I put her into trance and the eye contact holds her there. The second finger tapping blocks her arising of thoughts. Her mind will no longer” think” she is almost absolutely suggestible. My voice will move her gently forward into third trance.
And across the Mall the glass walled elevator goes upward slowly in its rise from one floor to the next, while the elevator beside it descends. The fountains play in the noon sunlight. The glass before our faces reflects back at us, Rachel’s eyes unmoving, my face behind hers, sexually close. She wants to know how Santa flies. Very well, little female. I will teach you something you never believed was possible.
The sound of my voice. I am close enough to whisper in a deep voice close by Rachel’s ear. My voice sounds like the rumble of far off winds. My voice does not disturb the trance, it deepens it.
Rachel goes into third trance. She follows anything my voice creates in images. I will speak only in images to her subconscious and bypass her rational conceptualizing consciousness. I will speak in word pictures not concepts. She is now in a deep state of Dream. She will act out whatever my voice suggests and believe it is really happening.
In a sense it will be.
I am going to give her in images an experience of being levitated, and of being able to fly. Just a simple taste through hypnosis, and she will believe it actually happened. Even her subconscious will think it occurred, because it is through the subconscious of this 13 year old I am going to act. I have bypassed her Will and I possess Rachel’s mind. It is an old thing I am doing ,from an older time. Science might explain it, but not comprehend it.
And science is afraid of it.
Am I cruel? Am I a manipulating bastard? Have I violated a child’s trust? Have I seduced a helpless little 13 year old girl? I could do many damnable things with my powers. They are as natural to me as Rachel’s capabilities as a Cassandra are to her. I could command Rachel with auto suggestion and imbedded hypnotic suggestions set to trigger either at a code word or at a certain time for Rachel to come to the place where I change my costumes. It is in a wing of the Mall as yet unopened, built, but unfinished. The escalators are not turned on..the rooms are enormous. I have the keys.
I could command Rachel to come to me there when the Mall is closed in the evening. I have a private hallway, no one can get in to disturb us, we could be alone, there are large couches and divans and intimate places.
I could give Rachel autosuggestions to make her sexually horney, aroused beyond bearing. I could make her believe that the feelings within herself were her own ideas and not mine. I could make the young 13 year old girl masturbate herself alone tonight like a little sweating beast thinking about meeting me in a private and intimate place. I could make her pull up her nightgown after she went to bed and ardently finger and rub her small unopened pussy while she imagined coming secretly, illicitly, to see Santa alone. And if I did such a wicked thing I would deserve all the punishments the angels would pour down upon me.
I could, I have the knowledge. I could make Rachel, just a 13 year old girl, pull off her excited sticky panties in front of me….she would willingly bend over the back of a shadowy backroom sofa and absolutely pant to be penetrated and wetly used... The erotically aroused young pubescent girl and the bearded satyr leering in the darkness.
She would feel my hands on her buttocks and the warm tip of my upright organ touching and nuzzling against her offered and uptilted labia , moving them apart, feel the size of the organ as it probed and twisted and poked and widened her a little at a time. Rachel could look over her shoulder at me with excited eyes while I cupped her tiny breasts in my fists and slowly but firmly entered the dainty wet lips of her moist trembling vulva. She could feel just the purple swollen dripping head of the penis as it crushed into her waiting willing virginity like a vintner squeezing the juices from a small juicy grape, and driving upwards, thick and turgid, filling her narrow hot young belly. Her eyes could widen and her head drop forward as she almost fainted with the pleasure of being filled..swollen and thick and monstrous.
Rachel could gasp and grunt and moan to have her buttocks gripped and her tiny breasts massaged rhythmically and urgently while my male erect sex drove in and out of her virginity as I leaned over her naked tender back, both of us grunting with lust until the young nasty and panting 13 year old squealed and coughed and gasped and squealed again with release.
The little 13 year old girl weak in the knees, unable to stand, collapsing with semen dripping down her thighs. Helpless, covered again by a great hairy goat of a man, feeling herself turned and lifted, entered again, penetrated and ravaged, bucked urgently until her senses swooned and fainted and she remembered nothing except the dark thrusting urgency of her belly and her loins. Crying out in her dreams Yes. An unending clasping of dark panting wet yeses.
The goat and the young witch locked in the darkness, their tongues in each others mouth.
But I am cold. And I am wise.
And I understand the human soul.
I have those powers. I can use these powers which are natural to me and which I fully grasp and understand…and which people are completely unaware that I possess, but I do not harm people. I am simply something no one believes in anymore. I am something which Santa conceals and Santa uses at the same time. I am a man who has abilities which are best left untold and unsaid. But my kind have always existed in the world. What I am is very old…and Santa is part of me as I am part of him. We both go back a long way. Santa has his roots in the dark beginnings of the mind and Christianity has tried to contain him and corporations now try to sell him. But Santa is his own. And Santa is not a tool nor a toy.
Santa always comes in times of Chaos, Santa converts the savage and brings civilization. Santa Protects the Children and guards the poor and Santa is the Giver who comes at night when the entire world sleeps and Santa gives Life in the coldest and the longest day of the year...as God gives...as the baby who is salvation is born in the dung and the straw of a stable. Santa is a creature of Heaven who is also a creature of the dark. ..and an abject servant of Almighty God.
And that is the truth.
I will give Rachel what she asks for , but I will not give her what she wants. She will have what she asks for but she will never take what she wants. And Rachel’s eyes want Power. I am going to give her a demonstration of power she doesn’t imagine. I will also give her an orgasm. But I will do it in a way that will give her no power over me.
My finger is beneath Rachel’s right ear, right on her pulse. I bring a second finger down. Rachels pulse is being tapped gently by this second finger like a single drumbeat. It is an anesthetic to thought..this close to the brain. All arising of thought ceases in her mind. Third Trance.
My two finger rest lightly against Rachel’s throat just below the ear. I begin. Images not concepts. I want Rachel’s mind to dream…not think…I must conjure images not concepts.( and visions of sugarplums danced in their heads) I must make pictures which move in her mind so the mind itself remains still and unmoving. Rachel’s mind in third Trance is a vessel floating on the waters of the dreaming Mind. I must not disturb that vessel with intellectual motion.
Images…and dream. Gently..slowly in the silence of my voice.
I am going to induce an ecstasy, a mild one which will be fueled by the young girls own willing subconscious mind. I will accelerate her perceptions for a fragment of an instant and she will be aware of an ascending lightness, which I will enhance with further chosen images. I will make her feel so light that if I blow on her with my breath which I will do ,she will feel herself lifted up and floating in the air. I will suggest to her that she is suspended in the air and I will direct her external senses to concentrate them on the motion of the crystal ascending elevators and then switch them to the motion of the waters in the cascading fountain ( are you wet, Rachel, are your panties sticky wet?) and finally I will SUSPEND her senses in the light of the skylight itself in an hypnotic state called Ligature.. Then I will suggest to the trembling aroused young girl that her shoes are falling off her feet and she will step out of her shoes and stand barefooted.
At that instant , as the slippers fall off her feet and she believes she is suspended half way to the skylight overhead, I will break the trance. As Rachel orgasms with my finger at her pulse and my voice in her ear filling her mind, engorged in a sexually engorged photic dream, I will cruelly deny her anything further and break the trance.
I do not like being teased.
I press my two fingers gently against Rachel’s own pulse. One finger holding that pulse and the other tapping her throat in time softly with that pulse. A gentle but demanding drumbeat which she recognizes as natural and her own. I am no intruder. Her empty eyes are fixed on mine in the shadows of the glass and through her vision she is entertained by the motion mechanical of a pair of glass boxes going up and down over the sparkling water of the fountain. The elevators ascending and descending like some vision of Jacob on the plains of Haran.
God is in this place and the sleeper knows it not.
Rachel tilts her head toward the pressure of my fingers and her eyes are as glassy as the glass itself in which our eyes, hers and mine, are locked together. Like some hanged man her head tilts against my fingers and my whispering voice. Outside the crowds move by unaware. My voice continues close by Rachel’s ear, close by Rachel’s ear as she hangs like some butchers prize on the hook of my finger under her ear.
The vulnerable young girl is ascending in a dream following the elevator up, elevated by my images. I am lifting her in dreams through a dream. Her shoes drop off her feet. Her slippers slip off her heels and fall. She is dreaming it, her slippers falling.
She is in the air suspended on my voice. Her head is tilted to the side as if asking some question of my tapping on her own heartbeat pulse. The thirteen year old girl’s eyes are open and she is rising like an elevator in her dreams. Rising like the water in the fountain. Rising toward the light of the skylight at noon. Suspended in a dream in that solid bar of sunlight aimed directly down into a sparkling cascading fountain as a crystal box ascends upward toward the skylight and the harsh Noon sun, the Caribbean sun, blinds everything directly beneath it in the marble court of the Mall full of voices.
My voice stops and Rachel hangs in the air, in an inner vision she is half way to the light shining down in her face as high as the elevators can go and higher. Her eyes empty and her vision turned inward on the silence and the sparkling light of the fountain. Light all around her. A drop of water in the fountain, her awareness orgasms, ejaculating in feminine ecstacy at the peak of vision…and then a fluttering breathless intake of sudden breath before a sparkling descent….down into reality once again. Empty of all thought, perfectly satisfied, having what she asked for…and not having any further power over me. I have taken her own weapons away from her.
You asked for it ,Rachel. My voice speaks to her hearing and my eyes break contact with hers. My hand drops to my side and Rachel stands there with her shoes off with her head still cocked awkwardly like someone drunk and confused.
“Put on your shoes, Rachel.”
The confused 13 year old shakes her head and turns around with a stumble on the shoes she is no longer wearing,( take off your shoes for the ground upon which you stand ,is Holy ground) to face me with her eyes and her mouth wide open.
But I am already moving. I am already gone. She stands alone there in the alcove wondering what has just happened, knowing it happened and not being able to believe it was real.
Was it real, Rachel?
You will have to give the answer, and you asked for it Rachel. Don’t tease me. I do not like to be teased. I gave you an answer and now you know what it feels like to “fly”.
Rachel stands in the stricken window watching me as I again go back to the Santa set and sit down and motion to a child in the line waiting patiently to speak with Santa. Santa in his white gloves with the big gold ring set with a Carnelian carved with a symbol no one can decipher in a language dead for four thousand years. “Come and talk to me, child, tell me your name. "
"What do you want for Christmas?”
When I look up again in a few minutes, and a few more children, Rachel is gone.
I am satisfied that the girl will avoid me now. She should. She should stay away from me. Anyone with any sense would stay away from me. What she just experienced will be very real, unquestionably real, and also defying explanation. The confusion should be a warning to the girl to leave well enough alone. But God has other ideas.
He teases also.
Well enough alone. Who started this, anyway?
The girl?
Not really.
Me?
I should hope not. I never asked for this exchange. I have absolutely nothing to gain from a 13 year old female who is Jewish and wants dreedles and other things unmentionable. If she wants to have adventures with sex…let her get them with boys among her own kind and stay away from old monsters like me.
No, it was God started this and He wants some finish to it.
I don’t want to think about it. I wish God would leave me alone.
It isn’t easy being me.
Rachel is His business. I am my own.
Where are your reindeer, Santa?, some voice from the crowd asks. Well, they aren’t in Florida, sweety, its too hot and reindeer hate Florida. I take a long pull on my plastic glass of ice water. The flash bulbs pop, I am once more busy, getting photographs for the parents of the children. The children want “things”, the poor parents want pictures of their children with Santa, they want to have their illusions that the children love them while the truth is that the children Need them and probably Use them and it isn’t quite the same is it?
Smile, Santa, big smile. You hold the little child of three on your knee and line the knee up with the camera’s eye.
CLICK!
Next.
You see the parent take the envelope with the picture of his child with Santa and you say to the parent. “He wants a truck, and perhaps a package of plastic dinosaurs to chase the truck.” And you both nod.
Children. Ah yes, children.
It is going to be a very long day. But then it is only for December, one month. I can bear this suit for one month. The children are good children. They deserve one moment and I will not deny a single child his or her moment.
You would think that Rachel would go away, wouldn’t you? Wrong. It isn’t over. You might wish the child would leave you alone to be human, but she won’t. She still has more to say to Santa.
Are you ready, Kat? Am I being indiscrete? Not your usual Christmas story is it?
It is the beginning of the last week, Christmas is only seven days away. It is a bad day. The photo-printer went on the fritz two days ago. Now it is dead altogether. We have one other printer, but the lines are longer now at the final hour and the pace has slowed to a crawl in the line. People are waiting. Tired and frustrated waiting.
Production on the photography takes too long. The cash register fails near the end of the afternoon. People get restless and frisky, security is called. Someone steals a stuffed fox from the winter wonderland and outruns security for the door. Someone else spitefully steals a stuffed rabbit. Someone on the upper balcony throws a cup of ice on the woman taking pictures. People don’t like the lines.
Santa gets up and goes out into the crowd to kneel before each of the waiting children. Santa is among the crowd and the attention is off the photography staff who are valiantly trying to reconnect the wiring the people have unplugged and get the computer booted again. Santa is talking to each child in the line and order is restored although no pictures are being taken.
If you can’t come to Santa, then Santa will come to you.
It is almost five in the afternoon. One of the faces in the crowd is Rachel. Suddenly she is right in front of me. Rachel presses a small giftwrapped package into my hand not much bigger than my hand. It feels soft as if it contained a folded towel or something inside the wrapping. Rachel says to me hastily, ”I brought you a gift, please take it. And thank you, Santa, for the cell-phone! I love my cell phone. Thank you!”
Cell phone? I didn’t give her a cell phone. But she seems to think I had something to do with it. Somehow she got a cell phone and she blames me. Thank you too. Who knows how she got it. Thank God, although I am bemused and continue on into the crowd to the next child while Rachel turns and disappears again.
The crowed hot hours pass. It is nine at night and the Mall will close soon. My day is over. I reach into my pocket and feel the small soft package that Rachel pressed into my hand and I take it out. As I stand there in the slowly emptying Mall , the lines now gone and the cleaning staff beginning their sweeping, I unwrap Rachel’s gift.
I stare down at the soft object in my hand. It is a doll…a toy stuffed animal…a representation of one of the characters from A.A. Milne’s ,Winnie the Pooh. It is a stuffed figure of OWL, that dyslexic wise idea of a childhood’s image of all adults. A wise fool, OWL, if you ever want to know everything about everything ,then Owl knows something about something.
Something for Santa from Rachel. Thank you for the cell phone? I smile and place the stuffed toy back in my pocket. I will keep it for good luck.
Good luck from a Jewish girl standing with one foot in childhood and the other foot in adulthood… a Cassandra gazing into the eyes of a Christian Santa Claus. Cassandra says your balls are soft, Santa. That toy says that. Well, let her. They were firm enough to stay there.
Thank you, girl.
The final remaining days in the countdown to Christmas Eve continued. In the last few days I looked up in amazement at the elevator across the court where my Santa Claus set was placed. And what to my wondering eyes did appear? Inside the elevator as it rose and fell mechanically all day, sitting on the floor, out of the way and undisturbed by the passengers getting on and off ,was the figure of a girl in a jacket talking on a cell phone.
It was Rachel and she spent the last two days before Christmas Eve riding up and down hour after hour in that elevator.
Rachel was talking on the telephone in her hand and looking down at me. From noon until late she rode up and down continually. Everytime I would look up at that elevator it was young Rachel staring solemnly down at me and sometimes when she saw me looking up at her, she smiled and waved.
The end of the story is Christmas Eve. I was done. Like the real Santa as darkness fell it was time for me to go. My stay at the Mall was over, my job done. I was going to change out of my best Santa costume and lay it aside in its box and I was going to carry that box down to the car waiting fully loaded for my trip 12 hours away for my own Christmas on the morning fast approaching across the Gulf of darkness.
I was standing there alone. The Mall was closing. Christmas Eve 2002.
I looked up at the elevator.
There above me descending toward me as I walked toward it was Rachel still sitting near the glass wall of the elevator suspended above the fountain. Rachel solemnly alone as I was alone at the end of this Christmas Season.
I looked upward into Rachel's eyes as she descended and I waited for the elevator to stop. And the door opened and I got on.
The elevator paused for a moment, the way it always does before beginning once more to fulfill its function.
Rachel was sitting in that silent closed glass box all alone on the floor as my big black boots and red furry suit topped with the velvet cap and my magnificent long white beard got on as the door of the elevator closed. A real beard, white as snow, the moustaches carefully long and curled upward, my tiny old saint Nick glasses on my nose, my real leather, not naugahide black four inch wide belt around my middle.
All six feet of me.
“Hello, Rachel, Merry Christmas.” I said almost sadly and quietly.
The elevator began to ascend. Rachel said equally softly,” Merry Christmas, Santa, are you leaving me now?”
The young Jewish girl sat almost forlornly on the floor all alone ,and beyond her as we ascended I could see the long Promenade of the Mall completely empty.
Strange feeling. Such crowds and now so silent.
“I am going home, Rachel, I am going home.” Rachel got up and came over and put her arms around me like a child does. I put my own arms around her shoulders.
“Will you come and see me next year, Santa, and bring me gifts?”
The door of the elevator opened and I turned and looked at the girl.
“Forever, Rachel, always and forever.” And I added, ”Time for you to go home also, girl, it is getting late. Do you have a ride home? “
Rachel nodded. She said “Yes, I have someone coming to pick me up in a few minutes.”
Good girl, Rachel, no more teasing me, no more wiggling your subconscious for all to see. Excellent. Till next year then?
“Goodbye, Santa.”
“Goodbye, Rachel.”
And I turned and walked away.
But the OWL from Pooh was in my pocket, soft little toy. Soft as my old weiner and a sexy little girl was saying something with a double meaning in that too wasn’t she? Well, you can’t win them all, honeychild. If you want some dick you will have to get it from the jock or the nerd in your homeroom class.
Santa don’t “do games”, Cassandra.
And my laughter rang in the empty Mall. my voice echoing. Santa was laughing.
This an excerpt from a letter written by a Mall Santa
I am a full bearded Santa, six feet tall, real leather boots and a four inch wide belt. Fur trim on wool and satin suit, it is custom made, a velvet wide fur trimmed hat decorated with a line of bells down the whole length. My white Beard goes half way to my belt and a heavy gold ring set with a red carnelian is put on over my white gloves. I have small old Saint Nick glasses perched on my nose and I am the very picture of intelligence and wit.
My eyes see clearly and they do look directly into yours. I am not a heavy man although I am physically tall. I am an ex-Marine Major ,long retired ,and I run two miles a day where I live in the mountains.
I have lived all over the world and my work in the Marines was with Intelligence Liason. As the very vision of Santa Claus I work at being Santa all year round. I do the Malls at Christmas time and I make $60,000 a year. I also do Charity work and spots on local television, I also help sell advertising to merchants to be used during the Holidays. I can do these things 365 day a year.
But the job does have its limitations…this is a story about one five week period at a Mall.
I had to go to the bathroom and could not be allowed to go very far from the Santa Claus “set” in the Mall . I ate one meal in the Food Court the first day and it was something I never repeated. I drew crowds everywhere. Impossible crowds, Santa can not eat in front of people, they twitter all around you in a circle like the damned around the light.
After that one meal, I had to have Meals brought to me and water supplied to me constantly, I ate alone behind closed doors in a marble Palace in a wing of the Mall still under construction. But "calls of nature" had to be close-by and STARBUCKS was only a few paces in front of the set where we did the photography. I used their bathroom to check my costume and face and cooled off a moment from the impossible demands of heat while wearing a Santa outfit under photography lights . The Mall provided a fan, which made a great difference in my ability to last through the day. But the fan blew the children's hair during photo shoots so I did not always derive much good from a fan since it was not aimed at me. The heat was constant, my sweat was soaking my inner shirt. And by the end of the day I was drained...literally.
But to begin my story. I had fled for a half hour of noon break( 1:30-2:00) to the back of STARBUCKS. I was able to sit for a moment in the back of STARBUCKS like at the back of a tunnel, in full view from inside, but not from the mobs outside filling the Mall with shoppers intent on what the Christmas Season entails in a Mall. The Starbucks staff were protective and understanding. They gave me water regularly and "red-eye" espressos to keep me intent when I was so weary with the long hours and the often almost unbearable heat. I owed every single child I saw my full attention, I did my best to have a fresh face and an intent mind for every child. My biggest fear was a snap of temper. I was truly afraid of being anything but Santa. Starbucks was essential to maintaining my ability to function and do a good job. I depended on them and was very grateful to them.
While I was sitting in STARBUCKS in my noon break sometime in the second week all the way in the back at the last table crouching there in my Santa sweats like a cornered and harried animal, slinking in the shadows with an espresso in my fist next to the bathroom door...a young girl came down the long length of the room like something coming down a tube to the back of my hole. She was about thirteen years old at my guess, still almost a child...just a beginning teenager. Perhaps she was seventh grade. She stopped just out of reach from my table and , believe me, I did not want to talk to this girl, I didn't want anyone to crowd me or communicate with me. I wanted to hide in the back and drink my caffeinerich espresso and shiver in crippled solitude for just a moment. And this thirteen year old girl had come to corner me. If I had known who and what she was I would have run, Kat. I had no idea who and what she was. But if I had known I might have fled.
She was dressed like all the other girls her age in the Mall , a little bodice and tight trousers and her hair pulled back tightly in a ponytail, and done with some kind of device at the back of her head, I do not know what girls call those things. I am over sixty and I don't pay much attention to girls of any age anymore.
She stopped just out of reach and leaned forward as if she were standing on the edge of a cliff with her arms thrown back stiffly , very like a hood ornament on a Rolls Royce, and tremblingly behind her as if to balance lest she fall while she leaned across some abyss that separated herself from me. It was as if she were standing on a cliff and she had to reach across some open gulf between us...as if I were hanging in the air just out of reach instead of what I was ,crouching in a shadow in my velvet and red wool with an espresso and a hunted look, like the Jack Palance gunman in the movie Shane.
And in a trembling and stuttering little girls voice she said "I w -want a D -dreedle for Christmas." And I looked at her face and I looked at her features and I looked at her soul and I went into her eyes.
"I w -want a D -dreedle for Christmas."
She was a Jewish kid, thirteen year old female...a Cassandra psychological archtype if I ever saw one.
She was one of those precocious pubescent females who were used down through history by priests as little prophetesses. Cassandra of Troy, daughter of King Priam, is the model. The temples of the god Apollo at Delphi and the goddess Artemis at the Temple of Bassae in the Pellopenese also employed the type. Girls of this type are used in Haiti today as voices for the spirits. Virgins, on the edge of adulthood ,but still girls. Cassandras. Tiny little breasts, small even features, she was elven tall and tiny and pert in appearance.
Only this Cassandra was a just barely teenage Jewess. And she was standing before me and she had no comprehension of what was moving inside her except that the psychological pressures were driving her to the edge of a cliff which only she could see and feel. And the girl was leaning across some gulf to speak to another archtype who was dressed as a Christian saint who had been dead for eighteen centuries, from a religion which was not her own.
What was she REALLY saying, Kat? What was she, a little Jewish girl only 13 years old, really saying to "Santa Claus" half in the dark at the back of a STARBUCKS in a crowded Mall in a region where maybe fifty percent of the population was Jewish and this wasn't their holiday, but was more powerful than theirs, more culturally dominant than their Channukah...or for that matter more powerful than the Muslim Ramadan which ended about this time also and never stood a cultural chance compared to Christmas which blared all around them from every source. Nothing blares like Christmas.
"I w -want a D -dreedle for Christmas." What was she really saying to me, this old tall fraud of a Santa with a cup of espresso and a stupid hat? How would YOU have handled this, Kat. What would you have said to this child? Quick, give me an answer, you don't have time to think. And neither did I. Things like this happen like lightening and you don't have time to think.
Do you know what a Dreedle is, Kat? If you had to go get a Dreedle where would you go?
During Channukah the Jews have a custom for children and old grandmothers, usually, to play together. They have a small toy top with Jewish alephbeit written in the 4 sides of the top, NUN,GIMMEL,HAY,SHIN ( the letters also have numerical value and stand for the anagram letters in the hebrew phrase A MIRACLE HAPPENED IN THIS PLACE)...the toy top is called a Dreedle ( pronounced DRAY-doll).
The top is spun and if the numbers come down favorably ,then the child is rewarded with a small yellow candy often shaped like a coin, but also candies wrapped in yellow paper or lemon gumdrops. It is a traditional thing associated with the Feast of Channukah...it has NOTHING to do with Christianity or with Santa Claus. Candy stores at Channukah time often sell a box of appropriate candies and many also sell a Dreedle with the candy.
But many Jewish matrons in a family have a handmade Dreedle used every year for the children and the oldest woman, the old grandmother is usually the one who plays this game with the children. Are you familiar with the eight days of Channukah?
There are lots of habits in old festivals associated with religious holidays that predate the religions themselves…dreedles are one of these.
In Eastern Europe there was an old "wise woman" in tradition perhaps with connotations of a witch called Belfana who corresponds to this Jewish persona and in some Eastern European areas where Jewish populations were forcibly converted to Christianity centuries ago by persecution and war...Belfana is cast more in the role of Santa Claus. She brings the gifts of Christmas presents flying on a broomstick and not the male Santa. There are places in the world in isolated areas like the mountains of Hungary for instance where Belfana is the Earth Mother of Life rather than Santa who is the Sky Father's representative. The competition between Earth Mother and Sky Father still exists in some places and the traditions on which such things are founded may go back ten thousand years. In some places Goddesses ruled men's lives, not gods. The dreedle itself has a feminine quality as an object...it is shaped like a female womb. I have even seen some with handles that suggested fallopian tubes at the styled top of the toy.
What is this little Jewish girl really saying to me ?
"I w -want a D -dreedle for Christmas." And it is spoken across an impossible mental gulf to a male representative of the Sky Father...in a totally subconscious communication from a little virgin Cassandra. A little sensitive almost teenage Jewess speaking to a Christian…to Santa Claus.
What would you have done, Kat?
Would you even have understood it? Do you even understand what I am writing now?
This young Jewish girl was taking a lot of courage to come up to me privately and address me. She didn’t understand herself what she was saying or why she was saying it..but she was exhibiting a very real distress and I think it was psychological and had a lot to do with her capacity not only as a Jew but as a virgin sensitive…a Cassandra.
A Dreedle is a symbol from the Old Religion in Europe from before the time of modern religions like Christianity and Judaism. The Dreedle is a womb toy..a symbol like an egg that is spun around and leads to "sweet rewards" and is the domain of old women and little children. It is not associated primarily with males. The spinning of the Deedle is an allusion to sexual procreation. It is an add-on custom to Channukah from a much earlier time …a prehistoric time when the Old Religion still had power, the occult world of magic and the seasons of the Earth Mother and the goddesses who sacrificed living men to the Full Moon…to Artemis.
Have you ever heard of the Old Religion festivals of Beltane and Samhein? Have you ever heard of the legend of the Twelfth Night or of Belfana riding her broom to deliver gifts, just as Santa Claus is said to ride in the air at night to do the same thing? Dreedles come from Belfana and Beltane. Have you ever heard of Belzebub? Same religion, the Old Religion.
Sexuality is a fabric constituant in all religions…but it is especially explicit in the Old Religion. Witches Sabbats were gatherings of the worshippers of the Old Religion. This girl does not understand what she is saying out loud with her demands. She doesn’t know that it is her subconscious that has pushed her here.
“I w-want a D-dreedle for Christmas?”
What is she asking for? She doesn’t know, she doesn’t even know why she is constrained to ask. All she knows is that she is female, thirteen years old and Jewish confronting a male Santa Claus and demanding I give her a Jewish Channukah symbol on a Christian Holiday. Go figure? Is she saying she wants a womb for Christmas…security is a womb. She is obviously in some insecurity. Her face and her motions say that. Or is this a sexual challenge..many challenges have sexual elements. Put up or shut up. Go for your gun.
What is happening here?
She is speaking to me from her subconscious. And she is unknowing of this fact ,but nevertheless also quite urgent in her demand. She is demanding. She is shouting at me to give her a “Dreedle”.
She is a Jewish child asking for something for Christmas. I am the one who gives children gifts at Christmas…but she is Jewish…not Christian. And she is also not quite a child either. She knows I am just a man in a red suit and unlike the wide eyed four year olds she undoubtedly knows I am completely without power and authority of any kind to actually provide anything…. except illusions.
A Dreedle. A toy top used in the Channukah festival, a symbol of Channukah itself right along with the Latkes and the Menorah. And a sexual symbol of the female womb.
I looked at her and I said, “Tell me your name?” She is standing on some mental cliff urgent and almost beside herself at doing what she is demanding.
“Tell me your name.”
I have to return her to the real world. And also like an exorcist I have to have her name herself. “Sit down here, with me.”
“What is your name?”
“Rachel.”
“Well, Rachel, my name is Nicholas, people call me Santa Claus.”
I held up two fingers over my head and motioned for the Starbucks waiter to bring me two Espressos. I pointed at the girl and she sat down and about ten seconds later the pair of espressos were in front of us served by the attentive staff who were aware of me all the time. I asked the girl,” Rachel, would you like sugar or cream?’ I wanted to make her sit and establish a moment of social communication and trust. Two Espressos. And I fixed hers as she expressed, sugar and cream.
The girl had calmed down a bit, I had taken her away from the precipice and now she was sitting across from me at the tiny dim table drinking a very fine Starbucks Espresso.
“ A Dreedle is a toy top used in the sixth night of Channukah, isn’t it, Rachel?”
“Yes, it is, do you know things about Channukah, Santa?”
“Not as much as you do, Rachel, I am sure, but I know that it celebrates being Jewish and that it is a memorial festival for the defeat of the Seluecids occupying Army under Antiochus by the patriot Jewish Maccabees about 150 years before Christ, and that it also celebrates that Jews and other faiths can share and live side by side with one another. I know that it involves acts of charity to the poor and to children and eating latkes potato cakes, and giving gifts and is a very family oriented time for Jewish people and that it is eight days long and involves lighting a menorah with successive candles each night of the cycle and that it co-incides closely in time with the Christmas Holiday of Christians. Am I correct?”
Rachel sipped her Espresso and nodded at me and smiled. She was pleased I knew about Channukah.
So far, so good.
“Rachel, do you feel that Christmas is in competition with Channukah in any way?”
The child looked up at me and nodded her head slightly and replied, “Sometimes.”
“Rachel, do you feel sometimes that Christmas is stronger than it should be and that Santa and the things of Christmas, all the things we see around us…even myself as Santa, are a little overbearing…that it takes away from how you feel about Channukah?”
Rachel is a smart girl and she knows what I am implying and she nods and smiles over her Espresso. It could have ended right there except for one thing.
God who is a meddler in our human lives did something which made a difference.
It so happened that by coincidence I had bought a box of Channukah Chocolates for a Jewish goldsmith named James Feldman, who had twin sons named Jacob and Michael, the day before, and since I knew he already had a Dreedle which was made of gold and inlaid with enamel as a family heirloom, I took the cheap ceramic Dreedle off the package before I mailed it to him and dropped the little Dreedle into my pocket. That Dreedle was in my pocket just by chance at that very moment. I had mailed the package to him that morning.
While Rachel sipped her Espresso I reached into my Santa woolen pants and took out the dreedle concealed in the palm of my hand. While she sat there I took the dreedle and spun it on the tabletop seemingly out of nowhere. You should have seen the girls eyes go wide. She sat the small cup of espresso down so that a bit of it spilled. I caught the dreedle in my hand before it stopped spinning on the tabletop. The dreedle disappeared into my hand. Rachel’s eyes snapped onto mine and I looked into her eyes.
“There is no such thing as coincidence where God is concerned, Rachel. I think you asked for precisely the right thing and that God, not Santa, is giving it to you now. Try to understand what God wants from you, and be proud of being Jewish and not concerned with Christian noises. “ And then I stood up and as I did so I caught Rachel by the hand and put the dreedle into her hand as I turned and walked back out to the set and again took my place in the furnace in front of the camera and the long line of children.
I considered the matter ended, Rachel had gotten her reassurance of being Jewish and gotten a blessing on her sexuality at the same time, but I admit I too was a bit in awe of how God had given me precisely what the girl had asked of me. But in all faith I know God to be like that and did not trouble myself further with His intentions in the matter.
But for Rachel the matter was still something that needed further attention , but then children often do not know enough to leave well enough alone. I have never been a believer in prolonged contact with God. My advice to anyone who meets God is to keep the meeting brief ....and don’t look back.
But I was going to see Rachel again, whether I Iiked it or not.
In the continuing week I often looked up during the day and saw Rachel out there in the crowd, somewhere on the edges usually, not trying to be apparent. But she would be there every day at some time or another. Indeed, the Mall provided sofa chairs and alcoves of such were all around the perimeter of my Santa set and the promenades of the Mall for the comfort of the many retired people, many of them Jewish I expect, since this wealthy area is where everyone seems to come to retire....and die.
Rachel was not trying to catch my attention. But she was ubiquitous and circling in those days of the third and fourth week.
I was in Starbucks again one noon taking my break when she confronted me again. I was sitting in the front this particular day drinking a cold mint chocolate Frappachino with whipped Cream. Starbucks had two front windows and had placed sofas near each so that patrons could look out into the Mall while they indulged in the caffeine they enjoyed from the fine Starbuck’s menu. I sat there visibly to draw customers into Starbucks while maintaining myself behind the protective glass and many people who passed were smiling at me and waving while many others were coming inside to do business for Starbucks. My presence encouraged that. Starbucks knowing this also , gave me my Frappacino for free.
I looked up and it was Rachel outside the window staring down at me. I made a motion with my eyes for her to come in and sit on the sofa with me. A moment later the small breasted young girl had come through the door and was sitting beside me. I smiled and so did she. I asked her if I could treat her to a chilled coffee and she said yes. All I had to do was raise my hand and since I was practically sitting behind the Starbucks counter already I soon had a sweet chilled coffee for Rachel.
She said, “Santa, I want a cell phone for Christmas.” I laughed outloud and took a sip on my mint Frappacino and smilingly replied,” And you think, Rachel, that because Santa once pulled a dreedle out of his pocket that I will now pull a cell phone out of my pocket for you as well.?”
Rachel giggled and nodded and tilted her head seductively . We were playing a game again. The cell phone wasn’t why she was here except superficially. She was here for something else. But I would play the game. I had begun to like the child.
“Rachel, Santa does not always provide what children ask for.” Rachel makes a flirtatious mock frown. Yes we are playing another game, I think to myself. We are perhaps teasing one another, an excuse for us to be face to face. That is what she wants. She wants to talk to me, to sit with me, to be close to me..the way so many children do. “I love you, Santa Claus.” It is almost as if she is saying this outloud although Rachel is only saying it with her eyes.
So many children snuggle close and say that to me quietly. And I understand, my heart goes out to the children who are not greedy, not demanding, not in such a hurry to state their business which is “getting” not giving. Rachel is one of those, even though she knows that the man sitting with her is not “real”, is not really Santa Claus at all. But still, like so many adults even, my presence is so perfect and my eyes on theirs, that they surrender to me for instants at a time. I represent the Compassion for which the starving souls of even hardened and realistic people yearn. And we all need to pray ,even when it may be and probably is, that there is only darkness to hear our prayers.
“Rachel, there are some things that Santa does not carry in his sleigh.” Again that mock frown from 13 year old Rachel.
“ I do not carry Mercedes or winning Lottery tickets, Rachel. I do not carry Pool Tables or Trampolines. I do not carry Ponies, Puppies or Hamsters, nor do I provide any living pet. And Rachel, I do not “do” cell phones because even if I provided them I could not provide the wherewithal to pay the monthly bills to service them. Have you considered getting a babysitting job or doing part-time work at SUBWAY making sandwiches…they might hire you for enough to pay for a monthly cell phone.”
Rachel looks into my eyes and realizes that I am speaking realistically under the guise of this Santa veil. She knows I am not going to perform any magic, that I am declaring myself to be only a man. I am only dressed as Santa, I am not Santa. I am just a man like other men. This round is over. What have you really come to talk to me about, Rachel?
I do not need to say this, she sees it in my eyes.
Rachel takes a long sip of her sweet chilled coffee and she suddenly looks up into my face and says something only a little child might ask, but her eyes are not the eyes of a child. The child and the woman are both in those eyes looking at me and the question she asks is another conundrum, another thing of hidden meanings. Seductive eyes.
“Santa, how is it possible to fly, how do you fly?”
The question is not asked by a child....it is only veiled by the childish voice. It is a woman asking me this question. What is she really asking me? She knows I am not Santa, she knows I do not fly. She knows that Santa is only an illusion and she is asking me a nonsense question and looking at me with a woman’s eyes. A child might ask this question and get a child’s answer, but Rachel is a little woman…I can see it in her look and the intensity of her awareness. It is a woman asking me this question, not a child. Yet it is a child’s question.
Tell me, Kat, what do you see?
Rachel’s subconscious is again speaking and her Cassandra is apparent. This is serious ground.
“Flying” is another allusion for sexuality. Flying in dreams is often accompanied by the sense of being naked. Witches in the old grimoires would strip naked and smear themselves with an ointment which contained seminal fluids and mount their "broomsticks"…and fly. What is hidden in those old folktales from ancient times when witches and mass sexuality consorted with the Horned One on the Sabbats? Rachel’s subconscious is wise and she is not rationally aware of what she is asking…or that I see into her mind to her subconscious Id standing there speaking openly to me face to face. Cassandra indeed….
“Rachel, if I told you how to fly, then Santa would see everyone able to fly, wouldn’t I?” It would not be in Santa’s interest to tell you how to fly, Rachel, now would it?”
“But you know how to fly don’t you, Santa. Santa knows how to fly.”
Rachel is pressing the question, her subconscious senses something in me as a man…Rachel’s Id is questioning me not as Santa..she is also talking to me as a male. Rachel may know what she is asking, at least at some level, this is a different question than the others. Rachel is pressing me to speak as a male…not as Santa. This little Cassandra is a hard opponent, she will blatantly come into whatever rational or moral defenses I throw up and she is sexually demanding again.
Does this child speak in awareness of what she is saying after all? That would be dangerous. I have no liking ,nor need, to speak to a woman on such a matter. “Flying” is not a matter I want to discuss with a 13 year old female. If she wants to know about “flying” let her get a boyfriend. Being a pussy-teaser with Santa is annoying.
I am talking to Rachel with my eyes and she is “talking back”. Instead, to break off the suggestive looks within the contest I say outloud, “Do you know anything about Latin or Greek mythology, Rachel?” If I were to speak in Latin or Greek would you know the words I was using, little girl?”
The question makes Rachel look like I am changing the subject. I continue,” Psychology has many secrets about which you , as a younger person without any studies in the subject, may be unaware.” Rachel looks at me again, she wants me to get to the point and she is waiting.
I can’t treat Rachel in a reasoned form, reason will not touch what she wants. She doesn’t realize it fully, but she does sense enough to know what she is doing has sexual arousal on her part, and that it is blatantly being offered to me. But she is so inexperienced that she can not possibly understand the processes involved in accomplishing a seduction or the consequences of such a thing. Seductions are not about sex anyway, they only use sex as a medium of exchange. Seductions are about Power.
Rachel wants a sexual sense of power. The Dreedle was a symbol…I gave her the symbol ,but not the power. Now she is back, teasing me to show her how to “fly”, she and her subconscious are sexually aroused by a taboo figure in me of Father God or an association with God, and a desire, thinly veiled, of a gauntlet of offered sex. Flying is being discussed, the ecstasy of orgasm is the deeper meaning. Teach me about orgasm, you gave me a womb( dreedle), now I want to talk about filling my womb.
Exstasis.
Exstasis is not a word this little open Cassandra will know nor would she understand it even if I rationally explained it. The ability to levitate brought on my quasi-sexually intense states of Exstasis are not going to be enough for Rachel. Concepts and stories are going to be useless against what Rachel is showing me in herself. “Flying.”
“Rachel, there are many ways to “fly”. There is the conventional way given to us by the Wright Brothers. You are not talking about that kind of flying are you, Rachel, you are talking about something else, aren’t you?” Rachel still sits in silence looking me in the eye very deliberately. She won’t flinch.
The Maiden witch Morgan Lefey’s confrontation with Merlin, the old legends all over again. Magic. The Maiden and the wizard.
( Hello, Clarisse.) This girl’s subconscious is formidable. She has powers ,this child. She knows I have them also. Neither one of us has departed from the modern world yet we both feel the other in that occult way I know, and she now senses also. Shall I speak openly to this child about what she is demanding? Magic, no one believes in magic. This is the modern world and Science has destroyed magic. Where does this girl come asking me for what does not have a place in the modern world, this all so knowing scientific age?
“Stand up, Rachel ,and face the window.” I stand up as she does. I am standing over her and behind her, close behind her. We can both see our reflections in the shadows of the wide plate glass window before us, this small alcove close around us, looking outward at a Mall full of moving people. My face is almost superimposed on hers in the reflections of our forms in the shadowed glass. And we seem both to intimately float upon the face of that glass surface.
Magic is within the mind. And it issues out of the mind like a wind into the reality of day. Magic is born within the mind as an illusion and this illusion is interpreted as REAL by the Mind and then projected upon the outer world. There the intellectual motion of this projection inserts the illusion into the reality of that outer world and makes the illusion live and change the facts of the outer vision. There is an old saying, that we see only what we want to see…or expect to see. Few people see what is actually there. You have to be trained for that. But people can see illusions just as easily, if another stronger mind is trained to project them, and knows how to do so.
And in this way Reality, which can not have being without the mind which contains it , changes the face of the outer world and brings a new face of reality back into the Mind. So this is the mechanism of magic and how it is made real. This is what is always at work in the realms of desires and the occult willingness to believe.
And I am quite capable of such things, little Rachel, and I am also quite capable of hypnotizing you like I hypnotise simple minds all the time. Children go to sleep in my arms with their eyes wide open. A click of my fingers or a flash bulb going off and the picture is taken. I do this over and over every hour of the waking day. Santa is who I am. And your mind is open to mine, as the minds of children have no defenses against my awareness.
As Rachel stares at her reflection and mine superimposed over hers like two lovers fixed one atop the other upon a sexual bed of glass, I reach down into her eyes in the reflection and grip her awareness with mine. I take her mind into mine through her eyes and she leans softly back against me standing behind her and she allows it to be so.
Out in the Mall the crowds, unknowing ,hurry by, but within in the close silence Rachel and I stand close before the reflecting glass each reflection of our forms locked in a mental physics, our eyes penetrating the others in the reflections before us. Rachel submissive and drowsey as she stares.
Sexuality requires that the male penetrate the female physically. I have just entered Rachel’s mind with my own. She is fixed and we have one awareness which I command .
And across the Mall the glass walled elevator, like some bright crystal box, goes upward slowly in its rise from one floor to the next, while the elevator beside it descends.
I reach up with my right hand gently and I place my fingertips, just my fingertips on Rachel’s throat just below her right ear. I stop in the stillness and Rachel closes her eyes and then reopens them with an empty look, she is asleep with her eyes still open. This is first trance. Her subconscious knows what I am. Her subconscious is my ally. Who in the entire world is more "suggestible" than a 13 year old girl? Who is more sensitive to spirits than a Cassandra. And I am dealing with precisely that ideal person.
And across the Mall the glass walled elevator goes upward slowly in its rise from one floor to the next, while the elevator beside it descends. The Mall fountains all around the elevators of glass sprinkle and spurt and trickle in the sunlight of the bright Skylights overhead.
It is Noon, broad daylight. I am perfectly visible to everyone in the court of the Mall. I am perfectly visible and no one sees me standing invisible behind the girl in the glass. Behind me everyone is unaware of me in the distant corner of Starbucks hardly visible. And from there none can see the girl standing close in front of me. If they would look they would only see half my back and little else. No one can see my hand touching Rachel’s carotid artery.
No one knows. And if they did see what would they know? What would they realize they were seeing?
One finger presses against the throat very lightly taking the pulse. I can feel Rachel’s pulse in my fingertip. It is the strongest point for a pulse in the body and extremely intimate. It is not overtly sexual, but the girl is leaning back against me and our forms are superimposed on the glass, her awareness is staring in first trance, and I am in deliberate and firm eye contact.
As long as Rachel’s eyes are locked on mine and she is looking outward through the glass and my eyes on hers in the same glass at the elevator going up and down in the twinkling noon light off the fountain she will be subject to my own mental motion. If I break eye contact she will wake up. I can move her into second trance simply at a touch of my second finger …keeping time on her pulse, a touch in time with her heartbeat. A tapping softly on her throat under her ear in time with her own pulse. Second trance.
There.
The small breasted girl’s eyes never move and neither do mine. No thought will arise and cross her mind as long as I control her pulse with my touch. Thoughts arise and can be blocked. With one finger I put her into trance and the eye contact holds her there. The second finger tapping blocks her arising of thoughts. Her mind will no longer” think” she is almost absolutely suggestible. My voice will move her gently forward into third trance.
And across the Mall the glass walled elevator goes upward slowly in its rise from one floor to the next, while the elevator beside it descends. The fountains play in the noon sunlight. The glass before our faces reflects back at us, Rachel’s eyes unmoving, my face behind hers, sexually close. She wants to know how Santa flies. Very well, little female. I will teach you something you never believed was possible.
The sound of my voice. I am close enough to whisper in a deep voice close by Rachel’s ear. My voice sounds like the rumble of far off winds. My voice does not disturb the trance, it deepens it.
Rachel goes into third trance. She follows anything my voice creates in images. I will speak only in images to her subconscious and bypass her rational conceptualizing consciousness. I will speak in word pictures not concepts. She is now in a deep state of Dream. She will act out whatever my voice suggests and believe it is really happening.
In a sense it will be.
I am going to give her in images an experience of being levitated, and of being able to fly. Just a simple taste through hypnosis, and she will believe it actually happened. Even her subconscious will think it occurred, because it is through the subconscious of this 13 year old I am going to act. I have bypassed her Will and I possess Rachel’s mind. It is an old thing I am doing ,from an older time. Science might explain it, but not comprehend it.
And science is afraid of it.
Am I cruel? Am I a manipulating bastard? Have I violated a child’s trust? Have I seduced a helpless little 13 year old girl? I could do many damnable things with my powers. They are as natural to me as Rachel’s capabilities as a Cassandra are to her. I could command Rachel with auto suggestion and imbedded hypnotic suggestions set to trigger either at a code word or at a certain time for Rachel to come to the place where I change my costumes. It is in a wing of the Mall as yet unopened, built, but unfinished. The escalators are not turned on..the rooms are enormous. I have the keys.
I could command Rachel to come to me there when the Mall is closed in the evening. I have a private hallway, no one can get in to disturb us, we could be alone, there are large couches and divans and intimate places.
I could give Rachel autosuggestions to make her sexually horney, aroused beyond bearing. I could make her believe that the feelings within herself were her own ideas and not mine. I could make the young 13 year old girl masturbate herself alone tonight like a little sweating beast thinking about meeting me in a private and intimate place. I could make her pull up her nightgown after she went to bed and ardently finger and rub her small unopened pussy while she imagined coming secretly, illicitly, to see Santa alone. And if I did such a wicked thing I would deserve all the punishments the angels would pour down upon me.
I could, I have the knowledge. I could make Rachel, just a 13 year old girl, pull off her excited sticky panties in front of me….she would willingly bend over the back of a shadowy backroom sofa and absolutely pant to be penetrated and wetly used... The erotically aroused young pubescent girl and the bearded satyr leering in the darkness.
She would feel my hands on her buttocks and the warm tip of my upright organ touching and nuzzling against her offered and uptilted labia , moving them apart, feel the size of the organ as it probed and twisted and poked and widened her a little at a time. Rachel could look over her shoulder at me with excited eyes while I cupped her tiny breasts in my fists and slowly but firmly entered the dainty wet lips of her moist trembling vulva. She could feel just the purple swollen dripping head of the penis as it crushed into her waiting willing virginity like a vintner squeezing the juices from a small juicy grape, and driving upwards, thick and turgid, filling her narrow hot young belly. Her eyes could widen and her head drop forward as she almost fainted with the pleasure of being filled..swollen and thick and monstrous.
Rachel could gasp and grunt and moan to have her buttocks gripped and her tiny breasts massaged rhythmically and urgently while my male erect sex drove in and out of her virginity as I leaned over her naked tender back, both of us grunting with lust until the young nasty and panting 13 year old squealed and coughed and gasped and squealed again with release.
The little 13 year old girl weak in the knees, unable to stand, collapsing with semen dripping down her thighs. Helpless, covered again by a great hairy goat of a man, feeling herself turned and lifted, entered again, penetrated and ravaged, bucked urgently until her senses swooned and fainted and she remembered nothing except the dark thrusting urgency of her belly and her loins. Crying out in her dreams Yes. An unending clasping of dark panting wet yeses.
The goat and the young witch locked in the darkness, their tongues in each others mouth.
But I am cold. And I am wise.
And I understand the human soul.
I have those powers. I can use these powers which are natural to me and which I fully grasp and understand…and which people are completely unaware that I possess, but I do not harm people. I am simply something no one believes in anymore. I am something which Santa conceals and Santa uses at the same time. I am a man who has abilities which are best left untold and unsaid. But my kind have always existed in the world. What I am is very old…and Santa is part of me as I am part of him. We both go back a long way. Santa has his roots in the dark beginnings of the mind and Christianity has tried to contain him and corporations now try to sell him. But Santa is his own. And Santa is not a tool nor a toy.
Santa always comes in times of Chaos, Santa converts the savage and brings civilization. Santa Protects the Children and guards the poor and Santa is the Giver who comes at night when the entire world sleeps and Santa gives Life in the coldest and the longest day of the year...as God gives...as the baby who is salvation is born in the dung and the straw of a stable. Santa is a creature of Heaven who is also a creature of the dark. ..and an abject servant of Almighty God.
And that is the truth.
I will give Rachel what she asks for , but I will not give her what she wants. She will have what she asks for but she will never take what she wants. And Rachel’s eyes want Power. I am going to give her a demonstration of power she doesn’t imagine. I will also give her an orgasm. But I will do it in a way that will give her no power over me.
My finger is beneath Rachel’s right ear, right on her pulse. I bring a second finger down. Rachels pulse is being tapped gently by this second finger like a single drumbeat. It is an anesthetic to thought..this close to the brain. All arising of thought ceases in her mind. Third Trance.
My two finger rest lightly against Rachel’s throat just below the ear. I begin. Images not concepts. I want Rachel’s mind to dream…not think…I must conjure images not concepts.( and visions of sugarplums danced in their heads) I must make pictures which move in her mind so the mind itself remains still and unmoving. Rachel’s mind in third Trance is a vessel floating on the waters of the dreaming Mind. I must not disturb that vessel with intellectual motion.
Images…and dream. Gently..slowly in the silence of my voice.
I am going to induce an ecstasy, a mild one which will be fueled by the young girls own willing subconscious mind. I will accelerate her perceptions for a fragment of an instant and she will be aware of an ascending lightness, which I will enhance with further chosen images. I will make her feel so light that if I blow on her with my breath which I will do ,she will feel herself lifted up and floating in the air. I will suggest to her that she is suspended in the air and I will direct her external senses to concentrate them on the motion of the crystal ascending elevators and then switch them to the motion of the waters in the cascading fountain ( are you wet, Rachel, are your panties sticky wet?) and finally I will SUSPEND her senses in the light of the skylight itself in an hypnotic state called Ligature.. Then I will suggest to the trembling aroused young girl that her shoes are falling off her feet and she will step out of her shoes and stand barefooted.
At that instant , as the slippers fall off her feet and she believes she is suspended half way to the skylight overhead, I will break the trance. As Rachel orgasms with my finger at her pulse and my voice in her ear filling her mind, engorged in a sexually engorged photic dream, I will cruelly deny her anything further and break the trance.
I do not like being teased.
I press my two fingers gently against Rachel’s own pulse. One finger holding that pulse and the other tapping her throat in time softly with that pulse. A gentle but demanding drumbeat which she recognizes as natural and her own. I am no intruder. Her empty eyes are fixed on mine in the shadows of the glass and through her vision she is entertained by the motion mechanical of a pair of glass boxes going up and down over the sparkling water of the fountain. The elevators ascending and descending like some vision of Jacob on the plains of Haran.
God is in this place and the sleeper knows it not.
Rachel tilts her head toward the pressure of my fingers and her eyes are as glassy as the glass itself in which our eyes, hers and mine, are locked together. Like some hanged man her head tilts against my fingers and my whispering voice. Outside the crowds move by unaware. My voice continues close by Rachel’s ear, close by Rachel’s ear as she hangs like some butchers prize on the hook of my finger under her ear.
The vulnerable young girl is ascending in a dream following the elevator up, elevated by my images. I am lifting her in dreams through a dream. Her shoes drop off her feet. Her slippers slip off her heels and fall. She is dreaming it, her slippers falling.
She is in the air suspended on my voice. Her head is tilted to the side as if asking some question of my tapping on her own heartbeat pulse. The thirteen year old girl’s eyes are open and she is rising like an elevator in her dreams. Rising like the water in the fountain. Rising toward the light of the skylight at noon. Suspended in a dream in that solid bar of sunlight aimed directly down into a sparkling cascading fountain as a crystal box ascends upward toward the skylight and the harsh Noon sun, the Caribbean sun, blinds everything directly beneath it in the marble court of the Mall full of voices.
My voice stops and Rachel hangs in the air, in an inner vision she is half way to the light shining down in her face as high as the elevators can go and higher. Her eyes empty and her vision turned inward on the silence and the sparkling light of the fountain. Light all around her. A drop of water in the fountain, her awareness orgasms, ejaculating in feminine ecstacy at the peak of vision…and then a fluttering breathless intake of sudden breath before a sparkling descent….down into reality once again. Empty of all thought, perfectly satisfied, having what she asked for…and not having any further power over me. I have taken her own weapons away from her.
You asked for it ,Rachel. My voice speaks to her hearing and my eyes break contact with hers. My hand drops to my side and Rachel stands there with her shoes off with her head still cocked awkwardly like someone drunk and confused.
“Put on your shoes, Rachel.”
The confused 13 year old shakes her head and turns around with a stumble on the shoes she is no longer wearing,( take off your shoes for the ground upon which you stand ,is Holy ground) to face me with her eyes and her mouth wide open.
But I am already moving. I am already gone. She stands alone there in the alcove wondering what has just happened, knowing it happened and not being able to believe it was real.
Was it real, Rachel?
You will have to give the answer, and you asked for it Rachel. Don’t tease me. I do not like to be teased. I gave you an answer and now you know what it feels like to “fly”.
Rachel stands in the stricken window watching me as I again go back to the Santa set and sit down and motion to a child in the line waiting patiently to speak with Santa. Santa in his white gloves with the big gold ring set with a Carnelian carved with a symbol no one can decipher in a language dead for four thousand years. “Come and talk to me, child, tell me your name. "
"What do you want for Christmas?”
When I look up again in a few minutes, and a few more children, Rachel is gone.
I am satisfied that the girl will avoid me now. She should. She should stay away from me. Anyone with any sense would stay away from me. What she just experienced will be very real, unquestionably real, and also defying explanation. The confusion should be a warning to the girl to leave well enough alone. But God has other ideas.
He teases also.
Well enough alone. Who started this, anyway?
The girl?
Not really.
Me?
I should hope not. I never asked for this exchange. I have absolutely nothing to gain from a 13 year old female who is Jewish and wants dreedles and other things unmentionable. If she wants to have adventures with sex…let her get them with boys among her own kind and stay away from old monsters like me.
No, it was God started this and He wants some finish to it.
I don’t want to think about it. I wish God would leave me alone.
It isn’t easy being me.
Rachel is His business. I am my own.
Where are your reindeer, Santa?, some voice from the crowd asks. Well, they aren’t in Florida, sweety, its too hot and reindeer hate Florida. I take a long pull on my plastic glass of ice water. The flash bulbs pop, I am once more busy, getting photographs for the parents of the children. The children want “things”, the poor parents want pictures of their children with Santa, they want to have their illusions that the children love them while the truth is that the children Need them and probably Use them and it isn’t quite the same is it?
Smile, Santa, big smile. You hold the little child of three on your knee and line the knee up with the camera’s eye.
CLICK!
Next.
You see the parent take the envelope with the picture of his child with Santa and you say to the parent. “He wants a truck, and perhaps a package of plastic dinosaurs to chase the truck.” And you both nod.
Children. Ah yes, children.
It is going to be a very long day. But then it is only for December, one month. I can bear this suit for one month. The children are good children. They deserve one moment and I will not deny a single child his or her moment.
You would think that Rachel would go away, wouldn’t you? Wrong. It isn’t over. You might wish the child would leave you alone to be human, but she won’t. She still has more to say to Santa.
Are you ready, Kat? Am I being indiscrete? Not your usual Christmas story is it?
It is the beginning of the last week, Christmas is only seven days away. It is a bad day. The photo-printer went on the fritz two days ago. Now it is dead altogether. We have one other printer, but the lines are longer now at the final hour and the pace has slowed to a crawl in the line. People are waiting. Tired and frustrated waiting.
Production on the photography takes too long. The cash register fails near the end of the afternoon. People get restless and frisky, security is called. Someone steals a stuffed fox from the winter wonderland and outruns security for the door. Someone else spitefully steals a stuffed rabbit. Someone on the upper balcony throws a cup of ice on the woman taking pictures. People don’t like the lines.
Santa gets up and goes out into the crowd to kneel before each of the waiting children. Santa is among the crowd and the attention is off the photography staff who are valiantly trying to reconnect the wiring the people have unplugged and get the computer booted again. Santa is talking to each child in the line and order is restored although no pictures are being taken.
If you can’t come to Santa, then Santa will come to you.
It is almost five in the afternoon. One of the faces in the crowd is Rachel. Suddenly she is right in front of me. Rachel presses a small giftwrapped package into my hand not much bigger than my hand. It feels soft as if it contained a folded towel or something inside the wrapping. Rachel says to me hastily, ”I brought you a gift, please take it. And thank you, Santa, for the cell-phone! I love my cell phone. Thank you!”
Cell phone? I didn’t give her a cell phone. But she seems to think I had something to do with it. Somehow she got a cell phone and she blames me. Thank you too. Who knows how she got it. Thank God, although I am bemused and continue on into the crowd to the next child while Rachel turns and disappears again.
The crowed hot hours pass. It is nine at night and the Mall will close soon. My day is over. I reach into my pocket and feel the small soft package that Rachel pressed into my hand and I take it out. As I stand there in the slowly emptying Mall , the lines now gone and the cleaning staff beginning their sweeping, I unwrap Rachel’s gift.
I stare down at the soft object in my hand. It is a doll…a toy stuffed animal…a representation of one of the characters from A.A. Milne’s ,Winnie the Pooh. It is a stuffed figure of OWL, that dyslexic wise idea of a childhood’s image of all adults. A wise fool, OWL, if you ever want to know everything about everything ,then Owl knows something about something.
Something for Santa from Rachel. Thank you for the cell phone? I smile and place the stuffed toy back in my pocket. I will keep it for good luck.
Good luck from a Jewish girl standing with one foot in childhood and the other foot in adulthood… a Cassandra gazing into the eyes of a Christian Santa Claus. Cassandra says your balls are soft, Santa. That toy says that. Well, let her. They were firm enough to stay there.
Thank you, girl.
The final remaining days in the countdown to Christmas Eve continued. In the last few days I looked up in amazement at the elevator across the court where my Santa Claus set was placed. And what to my wondering eyes did appear? Inside the elevator as it rose and fell mechanically all day, sitting on the floor, out of the way and undisturbed by the passengers getting on and off ,was the figure of a girl in a jacket talking on a cell phone.
It was Rachel and she spent the last two days before Christmas Eve riding up and down hour after hour in that elevator.
Rachel was talking on the telephone in her hand and looking down at me. From noon until late she rode up and down continually. Everytime I would look up at that elevator it was young Rachel staring solemnly down at me and sometimes when she saw me looking up at her, she smiled and waved.
The end of the story is Christmas Eve. I was done. Like the real Santa as darkness fell it was time for me to go. My stay at the Mall was over, my job done. I was going to change out of my best Santa costume and lay it aside in its box and I was going to carry that box down to the car waiting fully loaded for my trip 12 hours away for my own Christmas on the morning fast approaching across the Gulf of darkness.
I was standing there alone. The Mall was closing. Christmas Eve 2002.
I looked up at the elevator.
There above me descending toward me as I walked toward it was Rachel still sitting near the glass wall of the elevator suspended above the fountain. Rachel solemnly alone as I was alone at the end of this Christmas Season.
I looked upward into Rachel's eyes as she descended and I waited for the elevator to stop. And the door opened and I got on.
The elevator paused for a moment, the way it always does before beginning once more to fulfill its function.
Rachel was sitting in that silent closed glass box all alone on the floor as my big black boots and red furry suit topped with the velvet cap and my magnificent long white beard got on as the door of the elevator closed. A real beard, white as snow, the moustaches carefully long and curled upward, my tiny old saint Nick glasses on my nose, my real leather, not naugahide black four inch wide belt around my middle.
All six feet of me.
“Hello, Rachel, Merry Christmas.” I said almost sadly and quietly.
The elevator began to ascend. Rachel said equally softly,” Merry Christmas, Santa, are you leaving me now?”
The young Jewish girl sat almost forlornly on the floor all alone ,and beyond her as we ascended I could see the long Promenade of the Mall completely empty.
Strange feeling. Such crowds and now so silent.
“I am going home, Rachel, I am going home.” Rachel got up and came over and put her arms around me like a child does. I put my own arms around her shoulders.
“Will you come and see me next year, Santa, and bring me gifts?”
The door of the elevator opened and I turned and looked at the girl.
“Forever, Rachel, always and forever.” And I added, ”Time for you to go home also, girl, it is getting late. Do you have a ride home? “
Rachel nodded. She said “Yes, I have someone coming to pick me up in a few minutes.”
Good girl, Rachel, no more teasing me, no more wiggling your subconscious for all to see. Excellent. Till next year then?
“Goodbye, Santa.”
“Goodbye, Rachel.”
And I turned and walked away.
But the OWL from Pooh was in my pocket, soft little toy. Soft as my old weiner and a sexy little girl was saying something with a double meaning in that too wasn’t she? Well, you can’t win them all, honeychild. If you want some dick you will have to get it from the jock or the nerd in your homeroom class.
Santa don’t “do games”, Cassandra.
And my laughter rang in the empty Mall. my voice echoing. Santa was laughing.
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