Have yourself a merry little pub crawl

Now normally this time of year I am all about Christmas, a right jolly old elf. Typical Decembers find me laboring over selecting the perfect gift for every person on my list, making cookies and planning the big Christmas Day meal, joyously writing greeting cards and just brimming with general holiday cheer. Oddly enough, I just don’t have the spirit this year, that having been replaced with a major case of the "bah humbugs". In fact there seems to be a total lack of general holiday cheer in our household:

Me: What do you want to do for Christmas?
The Roommate: Get it over with.

So, in an effort to force the holiday spirit into our drab and joyless lives we decided to make a stop into Virginia Café, a downtown bar, for an event known as “SantaCon”. Haven’t heard of it? It is an annual pub crawl described as “a not-for-profit, non-political, non-religious & non-logical Santa Claus convention”; how the world wide event works is a city is picked and Santas from all over the world converge for an all-day and all night pub crawl. The roommate and I were informed of our local version of the Santa pub crawl here in Portland last week by our bi-polar bartender as we got liquored up before a movie so decided to make a stop back to check it out. What’s not to love about this concept: you dress up in a Santa suit (this part is required otherwise it’s just your average pub crawl) and you follow the lead Santa (with a bull horn for Santa herding) from bar to bar and hand out candy and trinkets to legally drinking-aged “children”. There’s nothing like the experience of a bar full of drunk Santas, I guess because they are just a little more cheerful than your average mid-day bar guest. Drunk Santas are very gracious about posing for pictures and tend to hand out “Ho ho ho”s like beads at a Mardi Gras parade. They also don’t mind being gawked at but I guess that comes with the territory. I asked a couple of cute Santas if I could take their photo and I was told only if I gave one of them my phone number and he got it; normally I wouldn’t just hand out my number to a drunk in a bar (call me prudish) but somehow it seemed ok for me to give it to a stranger dressed as Santa. One Santa came in from the blustery wind to say he had just run across a small child who was gazing at him in wonderment. When this Santa told the child that he wasn’t “the real Santa”, just a helper, he said the child’s face lit up, proclaiming “That’s what my mom said!”. Upon entering the drinking establishment and being unexpectedly greeted by the bizaar sight of 50 or so Santas, one man exclaimed (in a fake Brooklyn accent, no less) “Oh no, this is a SANTA bar! I’m outta here” adding “we don’t like your type” as he giggled and made his way to the bar. After many shots of Jagermeister, the lead Santa announced that it was time to proceed to the next stop, so the Santas moved out onto the street where amazed and confused holiday shoppers stopped in their tracks and puzzled as the red and white river of Santas moved down the street. Although the Santa experience didn’t elevate my holiday spirits to my usual level, it was a fun and unusual (to say the least) event. The Roommate and I vowed to find Santa suits and join the crawl next year because the best way to pub crawl is dressed as St Nick. In fact maybe I'll design special Santa suits with a space man theme or something. See, I'm making myself get a head start on next year's holiday spirit.