Santa Claus is taking over your town.

I have never in my life seen more Santa suits in my life. Truth be told, I had no idea they had that many in existence. I thought a Santa suit was a coveted magical thing that only a select few had and were allowed to wear with great care. I was wrong.

This past weekend was NYC's Santacon 08 and I participated. By participated I mean walking around New York City freezing my ass off with 2,000 other people dressed as Santa on a mission to follow "Santa" to any and every bar/ landmark allowed.

This was not a normal pub crawl by any means. There was no texting to the next place. The only way you knew what the hell was going on was by paying attention, which is a feat in itself when at every bar you are ordering 2 drinks at a time because you never know when the next time you're going to get one. The chant "Santa's on the move" is how you know it's time to leave the bar and you better pray you are following a Santa that isn't going on a detour to pass out in an alley. I think there was a conspiracy against my bladder that day, too. The second I would jumped in the bathroom line is when they'd start with the Santa's on the move bullshit. This Santa (well, technically I was dressed as Holly) was not a happy camper. She'd prefer more structure. An itinerary or a time line she could follow would have made her less stressed. But I will give them props- they split up the stops by doing bar/landmark/bar/ landmark so you could pace yourself properly (i.e. we met at 3 bars next to each other on 34th then an hour or so later went to the Post Office then went to a bar- don't ask me which or where I was just following- then went to Grand Central, then to the bars on South Street Seaport. The next stop was the Staten Island Ferry but that's all my crew got to. At this point it was 7pm and we had been out since 10am and we are in no way professionals)

It was a really fabulous experience and now we know better for next year: More clothes and more alcohol. And just for the record, I don't know if it was the lighting of the day or just the uniform in general, but there were some damn hot Santas- and you know I think New York is a draught for hot men. They had to have been visiting.

Funny story: don't introduce me to important people when I'm drunk, it won't be pretty. My roommate's co-workers were there and as I was being introduced, I swore on my life this chick's name was "One Dorito" (like the chip) but in fact she said Margarita (like the drink). There were 4 of them, so I decided I was going to name them One Dorito, Two Dorito, Three Dorito, Floor- and I called them that all day. What? I thought it was funny.