Jingle,

You Belles You!

You wouldn't know, girl, but every Christmas at Marshall's Department Store they rig up a special toyland for the kids on Fifth in between Kitchen Ware and Garden Supplies. It's hardly what you'd call original with all its big mechanical figures moving an inch north and an inch south for six weeks in silly little jerks, all the loud jingling music and whole masses of bargains everywhere you look that only parents are supposed to touch. It's enough to give a child nightmares clear through Easter like it does the parents: it's not till then they finish paying for all they bought. And little of it's what the child itself wants but what the parents wish they'd had when they were kids and, darling, if you say you want that silly space suit just once more I'll beat you over the head with it no matter what it costs. I know all about it from personal experience. I was in that department two whole unholy Christmases before I got myself transferred to window decorations in sheer desperation.

The Kiddie Fairyland at Marshall's was agony for the parents, terror for the poor personnel and tearfully confusing to the kiddies themselves. What's more, doll, the manager was a big, butch ex-All American three-quarterback from way back when croquette was just going out and each game ended in obsequies. And what's even more, he swore if he ever found as much as one real fairy in Fairyland he'd mow them through Garden Supplies, Knife them through Kitchenware and end up doing simply frightful things to them in Danish Pottery. He actually raged at the idea of a man

thinking of anything but sales quetas and Jane Russell, and the girls were supposed to dote on him or Burt Lancaster in that order. But all I can say about him is he was blind as any one of several bats. There were no fewer than three of us in his very own department, seven on that floor and I dread to think of a Kinsey report on the whole store! A whole battery of us used to eat lunch together upstairs and, Mary, what mad times we had! Naturally if he showed up, we all got baritone and clustered around two gay girls saying the most brazen things. Oh, how he'd leer and wink and wish us luck in simply improper whispers! Ah, those lunch half-hours! Mad, I tell you, mad!

Well, around November sometime Mr. Slaussen hies himself up to Personnel and tells Miss Pickins he wants a kind and gentle Santa this year. The one she sent down the year before got drunk and either gave away the bargains as if they were his or caustic monclogues on what he thought of all brats. The children were rather intrigued by all this but the parents told him exactly what he could do with his ulcers and took their business and babies elsewhere. Miss Pickins listened sadly, nodded sympathetically and assured him that this Christmas will be different. Being Mr. Slaussen, he remarked it had better be and marched off as if he'd just made the world safe for democracy all alone. And, believe me, it was different. That little Miss Pickins had Borgia blood in her mild little veins.

She sent the kindest, gentlest, sweetest Santa that ever minced down from the Pole. It

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