’Tis the season for gift giving, eggnog, Christmas carols, and, oh yeah, the drunken SantaCon where grown men and women get trashed and wander around the city dressed up as old Saint Nick.
How charming.
This Saturday, hundreds, nay, thousands of drunken, disorderly Kris Kringles will descend on Greenwich Village then crawl from bar to bar as they drink themselves silly.
At a time when we are all worried about employment, how to take care of our kids, and life without incandescent bulbs (which is, of course, fodder for another column), all these folks can do to celebrate the season is to dress up in Santa suits and make asses of themselves?
Brilliant.
The tradition of SantaCon begin in 1994, in, of all places, San Francisco. What a surprise. That party was sponsored by the San Francisco Cacophony Society, and was inspired by an idea thought up by that area’s Suicide Club. How appropriate.
Anyway, as most inane things begin — and this is no exception — that prank was loosely based on a Danish event where a political group dressed up as Santa and mobbed a Copenhagen department store just before Christmas.
Over the years, it morphed into an excuse for drunken debauchery, revelry, and lots of overtime for our police — according to an article in the New York Post, it has become so out of control that the NYPD is planning to deploy extra cops.
Well, you know those elves: a little bit of ’nog and a whole lot of trouble.
So fresh on the heals of millions in overtime checks thanks to the debacle at Zuccotti park, the police are called upon yet again, and the taxpayer — that’s you and me — pays the price.
Jingle, jingle, ’tis the sound of the coffers being drained.
Lalji Guha, a bartender at the Blind Tiger on Bleecker Street told the Post stated, “Their whole idea is to be jerks.”
Not for Nuthin™, but calling these reeling, drunken Santas jerks is an insult to jerks everywhere.
Joanna DelBuono's column appears every Wednesday on BrooklynDaily.com. She can be reached at jdelbuono@cnglocal.com.
