Shoppers establish their beachhead at the mall as Christmas campaign begins.

“You gotta look at it as a campaign. Like D-Day,” Drena Hills pronounced from behind a drift of shopping bags.

“In by 8, out by noon. Otherwise you’re dead. Because this mall after noon on the day after Thanksgiving is not a pretty picture.”

Hills, 32, spoke with the clipped authority of a woman who had just shown her Christmas-shopping list who’s boss. She hadn’t merely bought; she had shopped the biggest sale of the year at the biggest shopping mall in the United States.

At Del Amo Fashion Center, the First Day of Christmas arrives even before the Thanksgiving leftovers are gone. And Friday, about 150,000 hardy consumers converged, charge cards in hand, on the climate-controlled, pine-scented aisles.

Before them stretched a whopping 3 million square feet of leaseable space and a dazzling array of 350 stores--all with sales and all within easy walking distance of a jolly old mall Santa, of which Del Amo boasts two.

“You gotta time it just right,” said Hills, a Gardena resident with her mother-in-law, a visitor from England, in tow. Hills said she insisted that her mother-in-law come along “because I wanted her to see an American tradition.”

“We were at K mart by 7 o’clock this morning,” she said, “and the parking lot was completely full. Women were jammed in the doorway, pulling each others’ hair out to get to the sales. We got the last two sets of Christmas lights.”

By 8 a.m., she said, they were poised at one of Del Amo’s Santa displays so her friend Barbara Moschos could get an early Christmas photo of her baby son. By 10:30 a.m., the little cadre had gone through about 40 stores and $500, and Moschos’ baby--in a red bow tie and a peppermint-striped shirt--was snoring open-mouthed in his pram.

By noon, they were gone, and Hills’ prediction had come to pass: The mall was a jostling thicket of humanity. Down by the food court, Santa’s hat kept slipping off, and Raggedy Ann couldn’t get the camera to work. From the crowd came the whines of 5-year-olds and the shrieks of toddlers.

“I mean it now,” a mother warned her son. “Don’t you start with me.”

In the ladies room at J. C. Penney’s, 3-year-old Eric Tuholski of Hawthorne threw a tantrum, screaming that he wanted to go home NOW! But the day was young. His mother, Liz, hadn’t even begun her rounds at Sears.

By mid-afternoon, the Christmas carols were going strong and there was a mall-wide sense of a second wind.

Maria Ceballos, 38, giggled at a floor-to-ceiling display of wacky plastic potted plants that dance if you put them next to your stereo. “Ooh, look at that one. He’s groovin’,” she laughed, miming the slinky sway of a daisy with sunglasses and a goofy guitar.

As Elvis Presley crooned “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” Ceballos vowed: “If I see something I like, I’m going to run my charge card up to the limit!”

But down at the Hickory Farms kiosk, shoppers were more circumspect. Amid a cornucopia of meat samplers and cheese and sausage trays, the only big seller was the three-pound beef stick, two dollars off.

And the two-pound fruitcakes, piled like bricks, sat veritably unmolested except by an occasional passer-by who might lift one, just for the heft.

“No, we haven’t sold many of those yet,” admitted sales clerk Pattie Rollings. But her smile seemed to say that, after all, there are plenty of shopping days left.