just waiting for someone to complain about the demise of traditional Christmas practices

don't look at me. I've got my hands full stirring a house elf into the rice pudding. I'm not taking on a mob of rampaging Santas.

Besides, it's good for the kidlings. Teaches them important stuff about Life, stuff Fischer-Price won't touch. One Santa encounter of the street-riot kind, and see if the kids leave store-bought oreo cookies on the mantle this year. Nuh-uh, they'll bust their butts researching black forest cakes. They'll believe in the coal, they will.

Posted December 12, 2004 9:41 PM by pericat

Yes, someone "connected to our tribe" is involved. Santacon pictures were published in Apa-50 several years ago.

Posted December 12, 2004 10:04 PM by Allan Beatty

Photos from the San Francisco event:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hep/2117611/

(Well, I'm assuming it is SF, which has the only Metreon I know of.)

Patrick Farley's NC-17 comic about the the pagan roots of the winter holiday:

http://www.e-sheep.com/Saturnalia/

Posted December 12, 2004 10:15 PM by Stefan Jones

Thanks, Allan. I heard the same from Lucy -- not the part about Apa-50, just that there were connections.

Posted December 12, 2004 10:40 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

I want to be a bad Santa. Next year I'm getting my act together and starting my training early.

Posted December 12, 2004 10:42 PM by Jesse

More Santas behaving badly.

(via apostropher)

Posted December 12, 2004 10:45 PM by Mitch Mills

Oooooh . . . has anyone here seen the movie City of Lost Children?

These stories remind me of the (literally) nightmarish opening scene . . .

Posted December 12, 2004 10:59 PM by Stefan Jones

Gosh - where do I sign up for next year? I need to be more aware of these things!

Posted December 12, 2004 11:13 PM by Larry Brennan

Stefan: It occupies an honored place in my DVD collection, yes. We'll be watching it on Christmas Eve, as is traditional in this house. And by "traditional" I mean "something I just made up."

And in the vein of anti-santas, don't forget Krampus. :)

Posted December 12, 2004 11:21 PM by JoshD

People who complain about this are deficient in their knowledge of hagiography. St. Nicholas is the patron saint of thieves and pawnbrokers, the former of which have been euphemistically known as Saint Nicholas' clerks or Knights of Saint Nicholas.

This is very obviously an act of devotion.

Posted December 13, 2004 1:42 AM by Kevin Andrew Murphy

Well, this explains what my husband and I saw Saturday afternoon on First Avenue between the Lusty Lady and the Pike Place Market on our way to pick up the week's mail.

We says about 30 to 40 Santas - some dressed in a very doctrinaire fashion, some less so. One had a green crinoline and there was one reindeer (person in a brown suit with horns, not actual deer). One of the Santas had a sign, "Will Ho for Beer".

We figured we'd never know what was happening. But we were wrong.

Posted December 13, 2004 1:50 AM by Margaret Organ-Kean

Seattle has been host to drunken santa rampages for the last few years, it's generally people connected to the cacophony mailing list. There's a large crossover with the performance art/burning man/ christmas tree burn contingent.

These are also the people who celebrate the Brides of March, on or about 3/15 every year. Similar thing really, except that they've been marrying and divorcing various Seattle landmarks (Hammering man, The Space Needle) and wearing wedding dresses.

Posted December 13, 2004 2:03 AM by eric

Oh, and the fishnets were also a devotional garment, as St. Nicholas is also the patron saint of prostitutes. (Not to mention butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, and murderers too.)

Posted December 13, 2004 2:12 AM by Kevin Andrew Murphy

I recently got to watch some of the Portland SantaCon people make terrifying hybrid toys to distribute to passers-by during their drunken tear through the city.

Quietly deranged Burning Man, enginneer and social-justice types gathered at a house with crates of toys rescued from thrift-shop bins (many of them Happy Meal discards) , piled them high on tables, tore them apart, set to them with glue-guns, and made two sets of gifts -- unnerving hyrids for the kids (mostly involving the cavalier switching of heads and bodies) and wildy phallic and pornographic toys for the adults. Footballs were transformed into sex toys. Some of it was surreal and artful. There were a surprising number of sacred-cow-flaying 9/11 memorials. It was a hell of a thing to watch; they cranked out dozens if not hundreds of these fast-art pieces in just a few hours, only to give them away a week or two later.

(Those so inclined may view my rather tame comic-strip field report on the evening here. Sadly, I couldn't draw the nipple clamps one of the participants was wearing for much of the evening. Family newspaper and all that.)

Posted December 13, 2004 3:36 AM by M.E. Russell

Christmas isn't about Santa for me, which is probably because I grew up in the Philippines, which is basically Santa-free. The christmas cult I was indoctrinated into is different from the christmas cult my children are being indoctrinated into. They believe in Santa, although Santa only brings us 1 gift each at Christmas; they get a lot of gifts from us (parents).
What puzzles me is that christmas seems more fun when I was poorer, and lived in a poorer environment. I guess the gifts, both buying and getting, had a bigger impact.

Posted December 13, 2004 9:52 AM by mayakda

Santarchy links (as well as our family xmas tradition, the Norad Santa tracker - as soon as she sees him by the Statue, she dives for bed and starts making snoring noises)

Posted December 13, 2004 10:33 AM by julia

I'm imagining the poor family that books a wedding in the same hotel as Santacon. Grandma, Mom, Dad, the kid brother all wait for the elevator, which comes, filled to the rafters with riotous Santas. They turn, mumbling to each other about how odd -that- was, wait for the next car, get in when it comes, and are immediately joined by three or four more Santas, none on their best behavior. The Wedding Family gets off on the third floor, makes their way past the Santacon registration (Santas in various stages of santification greeting each other with hugs and profanity) to the Essex Ballroom, where the family daughter is being married, Mom muttering to Grandma that she hopes none of =them= try to crash the wedding...

Posted December 13, 2004 11:52 AM by Madeleine Robins

In Iceland he's 13 trolls (which would make a great name for a band):

"The seventh to arrive is door Slammer, he gets his kicks from slamming doors and making noise, using every chance he gets to disturb peoples sleep Then the nimber eight is curd Glutton (Skyr Gobbler), dairy products are his favorite and if stored in closed containers he simply breaks through the lid with his fist."

D

Posted December 13, 2004 12:12 PM by Murph

I was a participant in the original "Night Of The Santas", staged by the then one-and-only San Francisco Cacophony Society (Previously the San Francisco Suicide Club).

I had been asked by a friend to act as Santa for a group of underpriviledged children, and had been provided with a Big Red Suit for the event. Another friend called to invite me to the mass Claus-in ("You don't happen to own a Santa Claus suit, do you?"), and having nothing else to do, I went.

Compared with later versions, it was mild. Only one brush with law enforcement occured, when a Santa apparently exposed himself on an upper level of the Emporium on Market Street.

Posted December 13, 2004 1:19 PM by Tom S

Anyone interested in more detail concerning the 19th Century PR campaign to convert the drunken hijinks of traditional Chistmas into a quiet family holiday should check out Stephen Nissenbaum's fascinating scholarly history The Battle For Christmas. (Amazon link here).

Personally, I think we ought to revive the old tradition of Callithumpian bands (see the bottom of this page), if for no other reason than to ensure that the delightful word "callithumpian" doesn't disappear from the language.

Posted December 13, 2004 1:32 PM by Glen Blankenship

I was on the F train a couple of years ago when the car filled with drunken Santas. It was awesome! Nothing about the holiday has put such a big smile on my face since I was a little kid.

Posted December 13, 2004 2:24 PM by MsMolly

Am I the only one to notice that St. Nick shares the same name as a certain other pagan figure (who, in contrast to father Christmas, has literally been demonized?)

Posted December 13, 2004 6:06 PM by Sajia

The Cacophony Society has many links with fandom, some more obvious than others. So the con in Santacon almost undoubtedly comes from us.

Posted December 13, 2004 10:55 PM by Tom Whitmore

I'm having a "I hate christmas" day. Just wanted to partake of some of non-christmas cheer in this threea. Ah, that feels better.

I've been thinking, since the festival christmas came from was originally to celebrate the the winter solstice, and since I hate the cold of winter, I would probably be happier having a festival in mid-winter. Maybe groundhog day will do.

Anyone want to help me make a festival to St Phil? That lovable groundhog that brings gifts to good kids in February?

Posted December 16, 2004 10:42 AM by mayakda

I have an issue with this, but it has nothing to do with trying preserve traditional xmas. Though, I think I'd like to have the nice quiet xmas preserved. I'd like a nice quiet any-damn-thing preserved.

See, this whole thing sounds fun, until you actually have to deal with a bunch of drunken idiots dressed as Santa. They may or may not be idiots when sober, but when there's that many of them, you can be certain they will idiots when drunk.

Printed on vomit bags? Lovely. Though I'm sure many of them will not bother using them. Nor, I think, will all of them bother with actually using toilets. I could be wrong.

When I lived in a college dorm, I had to deal with large groups of drunk people all the time. It gets old very, very quickly.

So, I'm all for keeping the nice, PR-based xmas. I'm for anything that encourages people get drunk in their own damn homes and out of my face.

Posted December 17, 2004 12:43 PM by Michail Velichanksy

Spam takes no holidays, alas.

Posted December 26, 2004 4:29 AM by David Goldfarb sees comment spam

Yet more spam.

Posted December 26, 2004 12:27 PM by Bill Blum finds more comment spam

I wonder why this thread is getting hit so efficiently?

Posted December 27, 2004 2:28 AM by Tom Whitmore finds more comment spam

Bwah-ha-hah.

Let evildoers beware.

=====

ˇNo pasarán!

Posted December 27, 2004 1:39 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden