gwax's rumblings

This past Saturday, I attended what is prob­a­bly the finest event that I have ever had the plea­sure of attend­ing, even top­ping drunken cow­boy faires. This past Saturday was San Francisco’s SantaCon (aka. Santarchy), which after hav­ing heard good tales from Zoz years back and being reminded by a coworker a cou­ple weeks ago, I man­aged to track down (also avail­able in many other cities).

The basic idea of SantaCon is sim­ple, get dressed up as Santa or some­thing sim­i­larly Chrishanukkwanzaastice themed, meet up with a a few sim­i­larly dressed up folks and pro­ceed to have a merry time. There are, some nuanced details that make it all the more enter­tain­ing, for exam­ple, it’s more like a few hun­dred other peo­ple, you’re gal­li­vant­ing around an unsus­pect­ing city and you’re all con­sum­ing copi­ous quan­ti­ties of alco­hol. By my best esti­mates, there were some­where between 800 and 1500 Santas & co. that even­tu­ally became split between San Francisco and the East Bay. I ended up with the East Bay con­tin­gent, quite suc­cess­fully run­ning amok about Jack London Square and, sub­se­quently, other parts of down­town Oakland. There is really no way that I can prop­erly describe the scene that is half a thou­sand ram­pag­ing Santas; it is both one of the great­est things that I have ever seen and one of the great­est things that I have ever been a part of.

It is my absolute inten­tion to attend SantaCons wher­ever I may hap­pen to be when they hap­pen in the future and I absolutely rec­om­mend that the rest of you do the same. Heck, all the cool kids are doing it.