I don't think there was much thought put into it. LL had written the MOTT short story for American Airlines Magazine. He did that as much to promote our friend Clifford Brycelea's art work as anything else. Clifford, who did the cover to Haunted Mesa, got several paintings included to somewhat abstractly illustrate the story. AA mag had asked for a Christmas story.

Then Dad was putting Yondering together and, because he had it, just threw it in because he had it on hand. It was VERY common, in the era leading up to 1980, to have paperback story collections that were kind of at random, no theme, no sequence, not even a little bit of everything, just "here's a bunch of stories." There was a mentality, that even my Dad accepted subconsciously, that paperbacks were disposable. It's not surprising, the business evolved out of magazines. No one thought of them lasting, or being reprinted for 50 years, or being re-collected into more permanent volumes