Santa Claus is Coming!

Today, by a happy accident of timing, I was in a car traversing the Brooklyn Bridge at about 11:30 a.m. (on my way to a seasonal brunch with some buds). On the walkway above us were literally thousands of people dressed as Santa Claus, or approximations thereof. They were pouring into downtown Manhattan like lemmings, joining what looked like an already-achieved maximum density of Polar (North) related raiment.

What I was witnessing was “SantaCon 2011” which is this years’ version of an annual event that takes place on the second Saturday of December. Although it started as more of a “flash mob” several years ago SantaCon, like other big-city good-ideas (the Halloween parade, etc.) has probably gotten out of hand and now the word “mob” is, well, what it is.

To put a good face on it, participants are asked to bring canned goods to a couple of specific drop-off points after which everybody is just free to wander where their red-noses lead them. It’s all very jolly. To my eye most of the participants seem to be within the 20-30 age bracket and are, thus, not quite the decorous holiday cheer leaders one would hope for. SantaCon is, unabashedly, booze-fueled and as the red-and-white suited crowds surge northward up into the boulevards of lower Manhattan the pit stops become many and crowded.

It was cool to see all of the innovative, less traditional, Santa-ish costumes but it behooved curmudgeons of my ilk to just get out of the way and smile indulgently at what the young whippersnappers come up with next. To try to put this into perspective, it’s not like one has all that much time to take in any one costume; the mob was massive and moving like a red and white tsunami from south to north. According to the website “SantaCon is a non-denominational, non-commercial, non-political and non-sensical Santa Claus convention that occurs once a year for absolutely no reason.”

I suppose there are rules about not throwing up in the gutters but I didn’t bother researching that.