Which is this: a walk-through, a meet-and-greet with the general public in the northeast corner of the mall, where, dressed as Santa, I will make chitchat, meander, and then fade through some side door into the bowels of the complex again. So we take a drive around—me in my red cap, Fancy in his pointy hat—and somehow end up on a road running north out of town that’s allegedly closed to the public and leads to the Fort Irwin military reservation in the Tiefort Mountains, where even now the Army is engaged in war games. It’s a fair question, one that maybe should have occurred to me before now, before I came in here looking as I look, in red coat and fake hoary beard, or for that matter before barnstorming the country in search of something that is nearly impossible to explain and perhaps more impossible to find but boils down to a simple belief in faith and magic.
Author: michael paterniti
Published at: 2025-12-23 21:14:00
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