Saturday, December 11, 2010

the east village hates children

i spent the morning on a quest for stocking stuffers (and for the record, let me just say i found the wild and wonderful world of the internet barely more than minimally helpful in directing me to unique, quirky little places to find stocking stuffers .... i ended up just bundling up, opening the door, and walking in the directions that i intuitively sensed would have what i was looking for ... so it was more of an adventure than an exercise in efficiency, but it's all good).

my trek took me into the heart of the east village, where literally hundreds of mr. and mrs. santa clauses (and, here and there, the nonconformist reindeer or elf) were pouring into the streets or disappearing from the streets into little shops (though when i looked closer, they appeared to be disappearing into little pubs more often than little shops).  every corner i turned was speckled in red and white.  ordinarily, i would really have to argue that the west village is much cooler than the east village (because i am, of course, quite biased).  but maybe there would be less enmity between the villages if the eastern side were to share its "dress like santa claus" memos with the western side.  you know, invited us to play too.  or at least just let us know so we would have taken our cameras on our stocking stuffer expeditions.

nonetheless, should i someday become a nyc parent, i'm going to not only have to explain why santa claus looks different depending on which store my kid sees him in, or why the miracle on 34th street parade santa claus is publicly quite drunk, or how there can be multiple santa clauses at once, but also why hundreds of potentially drunken santa clauses annually flood the city.


okay ... so apparently this was not just an east village thing.  i have just discovered it is a city-wide convention - the drunken santas were still going strong at 9.00pm and had indeed more than infiltrated the west village.  http://nycsantacon.com/ (and oops ... they say "every time you call santacon a bar crawl, a sugarplum fairy dies" ... i hope my above insinuation results in nothing more than maiming).

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