Shopping in a Winter Wonderland at Mall of America : Retailing: The results are somewhat mixed as the world’s largest mall finishes its first holiday season.

It was the inaugural holiday season at America’s mall, an occasion for stretching the limits of human experience. So they started early and big.

There was a parade with the debut of Santa A. Claus, 52 (formerly J. Patrick Allen of Catasauqua, Pa.). Then promoters rounded up 10,000 people for a jingle bell choir, purportedly the biggest in history. The date was Nov. 13, burying the quaint notion that Thanksgiving is soon enough.

The happy throng swelled to 40,000 and overflowed the huge atrium at the Mall of America. Organizers handed out 10,000 jingle bells in 20 minutes, more than eight jingle bells per second, surely another world record.

Presiding over the event was noted maestro Philip Brunelle, who arrived in his conducting costume aboard a giant jingle bell. He climbed halfway up a stopped escalator atop the four-story atrium and conducted his flock below.

“It was an awesome moment,” recalls Mike Dorsey, a publicist for the mall. “He had them in the palm of his hands.”

More to the point, as the crescendo of bells reverberated through the nation’s largest enclosed shopping, recreation, eating, drinking and entertainment complex, at least 160,000 others--oblivious of their brush with musical history--plied the three miles’ worth of 400 stores, 14 movie theaters and 40-odd restaurants, plus seven acres of Knott’s Camp Snoopy amusement park.

After months of solid crowds since its early August opening, it seemed a credible approximation of what the Mall of America had immodestly promised to offer: a rearrangement of the way the industrialized human race spends its off-duty time.

And it was an auspicious holiday kickoff, feeding a sense of economic recovery nationwide in the weeks after the presidential election.

Traffic and sales have since leveled off, here and elsewhere, to what are described as good but unspectacular levels that have yet to return to the heady pace of mid-November. But as the final week of holiday shopping begins, mall spokeswoman Maureen Hooley says the heavy action is just beginning: “You can tell it’s Christmas out there now. You can tell it’s building.”

Retailers here certainly hope so. They are still shaking their heads over the day after Thanksgiving, when a traffic-control snafu by the mall’s brain trust caused the crowd of shoppers and gawkers to intersect with those from a National Hockey League game across the street. For two hours it was gridlock in the world’s largest and best-lighted parking ramp--and a pre-Thanksgiving feast of vindication for local critics who view the outsized mall as a place to stay out of the way of.

Then wouldn’t you know, on the Thanksgiving weekend that retailers live for, the crowds refused to match the stores’ grandiose expectations. Those who live by the hype are liable to die by the hype--in this case, by news media predictions of a traffic tsunami as Christmas and the nation’s economic recovery converged on the gonzo mall at the same moment.

Like Los Angeles during the 1984 Olympics, the Mall of America was billed as the place not to be on Thanksgiving weekend. Complains a toy store manager: “The radio had ‘mall updates’ all day, warning people to stay away. I wouldn’t have come down here either.”

Not that the place was empty. Mall officials say their tally that Friday, extrapolated from a vehicle count by electronic sensors, was 170,000 visitors. That was better than the opening-day gala last August. And John Wheeler, who manages the mall for developer Melvin Simon & Associates, says it was 20,000 more than he expected.

But many retailers who cast their lot with this mall of malls expected a lot better.

“We all had very high expectations because it’s supposed to be such a great mall,” says Hilary Werner, manager of the big Abercrombie & Fitch store. “But my volume was the same as a normal Saturday. It was very disappointing. We have stores one-third the size that were beating us.”

Such choppy seas in the monster mall’s shakedown cruise make it a dubious barometer of the nation’s shopping mood this year. And its motley mix of vacationing revelers, serious local shoppers, Iowa farmers and Disney World-bound Japanese make the mall’s very identity hard to figure.

While there is a refrain of “I didn’t expect to like it but I do,” shoppers provide little clue toward how it will all turn out.

“I love it,” says Diane Beeler, a school administrator from the far suburb of Somerset, Wis.

“My goal is to know this place like the back of my hand. We intend to fly in once a month,” says Julia DeHart of suburban Detroit.

“I find it a very irritating place to go,” says Gretchen Stedman of Minneapolis, quality representative at a technology firm.

“We aren’t too impressed. Our malls in Des Moines are just as nice,” says Tana Van Roekel, a retiree from Pella, Iowa.

The mall crawls with an average 130,000 people a day, enough to reach its oft-ridiculed target of 46 million visits a year by 1995, which would make it the nation’s No. 1 anything and leave Disney World in the dust.

According to Wheeler, the mall is registering sales of “well over” $500 per square foot of retail space and will easily exceed $400 over the long term. Experts say $250 is good for a shopping center.

But the heavy reliance on tourists--who fill the mall on weekends, often arriving by tour bus from Minnesota, Iowa, the Dakotas, Wisconsin, Illinois, Nebraska and Kansas--makes retailers uneasy. Weekdays are described as very slow.

And what happens after every American has been here?

“We’re beating about 90% of our predictions,” says Erik Nordstrom, manager of the Nordstrom department store, which joins Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s and Sears as anchors of the mall. “But it’s a weird store for us. Normally, malls feed off of us. But here, we feed off the mall’s traffic. We know the mall is a big attraction, almost like a vacation for people. The big question for us is whether the local customer will make us his routine shopping stop. We don’t know that yet.”

On the theory that if people come, they’ll shop, the mall’s owners want people to think of it as somehow grander than a mall. It’s a wispy concept that is still taking shape, but the glue for this identity seems to be the superlative.

That’s why the two Santas chosen from a huge pool of applicants--Pennsylvania’s Mr. Claus and a gentleman named Wally Johnson--have real beards and bellies and look as good as the ones in the old Coca-Cola magazine ads. The bigness of the mall, in turn, is why Claus, 52, took the job.

“It’s the nation’s largest mall. I can meet more children out here than anyplace else,” says Claus, who changed his name legally in 1986.

That’s also why there is a 1,200-pound wreath made of hundreds of stuffed Snoopies hanging from the ceiling, and why the Hanukkah menorahs that went up Friday are 20 feet high. It is part of a $750,000 budget, the biggest ever for the nation’s largest Christmas decorating company.

“We need to be larger than life,” says Nancy Kays, whose Creative 1 marketing firm coordinated the holiday events.

Meanwhile, the superlative crowds have made the mall a hot venue for those who want to be seen and heard, from musicians to evangelists. An overture came from the Society of Bacchus at Yale University, which was awarded a January slot. Then there is Wooddale, a Baptist church in suburban Eden Prairie, which attracted 6,000 to a sermon in the mall’s rotunda titled, “The Unknown God of the Mall.”

The church’s senior pastor, Leith Anderson, delivered the sermon and said he felt like the Apostle Paul when he visited recorded history’s first shopping mall, the Agora in ancient Greece.

“He was stunned by what he saw,” Anderson says.