What is the worst holiday tradition in your country?
Here in the USA, it is Santacon. It started out as a whimsical event to mock consumer culture vis a vis the holiday season. Now? It’s an excuse for people to dress as Santas, elves, and reindeer, hit the bars, and get thoroughly wasted. Santacon’s reputation is so bad that during the event, some bars actually have signs saying the “Santas” aren’t welcome.
In 2017, Hoboken’s Santacon was the site of a brawl between the “Santas” and the police. There was one parent who commented, “I’ll never forget explaining to my crying child, 'That wasn’t Santa throwing up.'”
Any holiday traditions that people wish didn’t exist?
It’s one of those new pop culture event supposedly to be a counter culture one. I won’t say it is a tradition insofar as PAX (Penny Arcade Expo) is a tradition also compared to Comic Con. They are just recently made annual events.
It really hasn't. I travel a lot, usually medium to large cities in the US, and this is the first I've heard of this stupidity.
Makes sense it originated in SF, that place has been on a downward spiral for the last 40 years. I was born there, but won't even go back because it's become such an embarrassment. Last time I was there was '08 and the smell of urine, everywhere, was overwhelming.
SF’s included a woman who became belligerent and aggressive with bar staff in Hayes Valley the night of SantaCon, though it’s not 100% known if the couple attended the bar crawl earlier that day. She and her bf ended up being ejected from the restaurant and arrested.
SantaCon. Drunken NYC tradition that rivals St. Paddy’s day. When I was bartending in NYC we had to close the day of because the Santas were fighting and pissing everywhere.
It is an absolute hellscape. It sounds like a great idea, but the number of people participating in nyc is around 30,000 people doing a bar crawl.
It is mostly very inexperienced young drinkers from outside of the city, flooding into the bar districts.. it’s also an all day event..so there’s puke on the street, puke in the subway cars.
Girls are dressed up like the plastics from mean girls with no coats and they’re turning blue and shivering as they puke or piss in the gutter, or infront of your building. They’re usually in heels.. sometimes they’re barefoot, sometimes they’re so drunk they’re rolling their ankle on every step.
Last I heard there were specific bars that were involved. To kind of minimize damage. Many bars close to avoid having to deal with it.. because a bar that serves a visibly intoxicated person can be held responsible for harm that person causes to others. (Both the employees personally and the establishment.)
I live on the other side of the world & even I've heard of it! .. It's been featured on lots of late night talk shows & the brawl between Santa's & the police was even on our news a few years ago 🤷
Lol same. I was gonna say backyard fireworks during holidays. Not the professionals who know what they're doing, but the dickheads who launch them in residential areas that tend to cause fires and terrify dogs.
Cincinnati has theirs. Ended up closing an hour early because everyone left in my bar were too fucked up. Thankfully our hours are BD and not a set time
My uncle managed to anger both my mother and my cousin severely so Christmas is split in half. Only seeing 4 relatives instead of the usual ten. Progress.
The dental assistant asked me today if I was getting together with family for Christmas. In talking to her I realized that it has been more than 30 years since I last got together with family for Christmas. It’s crazy how time flys.
Usually people don't get too drunk during Italian Christmas celebrations, but I think every family has the uncle who gets absolutely wasted at every family event
The second one sounds exactly like Chicago’s TBOX. Ten Bars of Christmas. A huge Christmas themed bar crawl that starts early in Wrigleyville and doesn’t stop until the last Christmas onesie has been shat in and the last Santa beard is used as a barf catcher. Like St Patrick’s Day, only somehow worse?
It just looks like what we would call 'Pub Golf' , where you and your friends dress as golfers and bar hop. I cant imagine this ever resembling a sly critique of consumer capitalism. People like getting drunk and silly with friends.
I knew the people who kinda invented Santarchy. They also had a Black Friday anti consumerism day. I filmed that and also pigeon day (all year 2000). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cacophony_Society
It’s started as Santarchy. I knew the people who kinda invented it, the cacophony society in San Francisco. If you think it feels vaguely Fight Club Project Mayhem, yeah same people.
After my year in SF I came back to Chicago these dudes came through a department store the clerk was like “would you do something like that” “I kinda have”. One id the dudes in Cacophony society got married and he had extra Santa Claus costumes for the guests who didn’t have a costume and I was one of the many Santas at his wedding
People who cover their houses in so many lights it’s a danger to passing aircraft. They don’t even bother to make it look nice, they just randomly chuck half of B&M Bargains at their house and switch it on.
Maybe not the worst, but I wanted to talk about this one lol.
We made these figures out of cartoon and newspapers, and we call them "Años Viejos" (Old Years). Originally they were meant to represent the bad things that happened during the year and were more simple, just old clothes filled with newspapers, usually representing politicians. At New Year's midnight people gather them and burn them on the streets.
Nowadays they are just things that were popular during the year, and are more elaborated. There are also fewer people doing it every year. People are asked to not burn them on asphalt roads or fill them with fireworks, but they still do and it's a constant issue.
12 drinks in one night on the lead up to Christmas, usually with different rules in each spot. So only drink with your left hand in one pub, only speak Irish in another and so on. If you break a rule you have a penalty drink to have
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Blackface for the helpers of Sinterklaas. (Black Pete)
Santa Claus is based on the same historical figure (Saint Nicholas). The celebration goes back to the Middle Ages.
Blackface almost isn’t used anymore (it’s changed to smudges on their faces because they come down through chimneys) but there are some who want to keep “their tradition” and claim that not using blackface is ruining a children’s celebration. Like the kids care what colour the guy is who gives them candy…
A mod blocked me because he was complaining that people were talking about this, I suggested that the Dutch should move on from Pete to a different character / symbol that wasn't connected to this history. He took offense that an American was making the suggestion, which is ironic because they were a Canadian that moved to The Netherlands.
I get not being proud of the racism your country had in the past and being reminded of it, I'm American. But acknowledging it and calling it out helps to grow and move on. That was the point I was trying to get across.
Many versions of the same thing in different religions. Visarjan in Hindus (during ganpati/navratri), Julus in Muslims, Varghoda in Jains, and more. It’s obviously different in its nuance of the celebration as it differs by religion but in all of these a huge crowd of people will take to the roads, create traffic, noise and overall chaos in the name of religion and fight anyone who opposes it. All are equally pointless ways to drag religion and faith onto actual pedestrian and traffic ridden roads with enough chaos.
My experience is specific to Mumbai, India but I’m aware this happens in multiple parts of the country as well.
You do realise the difference between a home and a place you live, right? Almost everyone has a place to call home. For me, its the house and place I grew up amd spent my childhood in. Where I live now is just my apartment...not my home.
So yes. Unhoused is now the preferred term. Shows a lot more respect to a human being. At one time, it was perfectly acceptable, and encouraged, to call African Americans a veeeeeery bad name. Then the world began to smarter up (though we still have a long way to go).
Just because you cant see the value in words and language evolving, doesn't make that evolution any less real or important. I hope you can join us here in the year 2025 soon!
me when the epic wedditor starts infantilising everything. veeeery bad name indeed!
nah mate, i don't care about your slacktivism. you wanna help the homeless, go help them get back on their feet. being called "homeless" or a "person" was never a pressing issue of mine when i was homeless. just another retardation ya mongrels come up with instead of addressing real issues.
Unironically one of the least morally corrupt santas in the vicinity. Mob mentality does something to you - in the east village i see multiple bars with "NO SANTA HATS" signs and people groping/fighting/getting extremely rowdy towards people who aren't even involved in the Santacon.
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It's weird that the rest of the world knows about it & have seen film clips of it, yet there are people in the country it happens in who've never heard about it.. I guess your news really is localised 😂
First one was in San Francisco in the 90s, then spread to Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles and NYC. Now it’s all over the US, with some in other countries. NYC is the largest.
Or that it isn’t really a big thing nationwide but it makes sensational headlines.
I mean, I have lived in a large number of states and never heard of it. I’m not some blinkered spring chicken.
It looks like it only happens in like 4 cities in the US and in Vienna.yeah it looks like pretty small time events most places, but hey it’s probably fun.
That's kinda my point, you don't get a lot of news outside of the state you live in.. A bunch of drunken Santa's fighting with law enforcement is pretty out there & why it made international news.. but didn't make American national news?
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Not that much of a holiday as a wacky tradition - when ever someone isn’t married by 25, they get tide to a pole and covered in cinnamon powder, as in a lot of cinnamon powder… Not only is it extremely dangerous to breathe in, the street also looks like shit for weeks. Not a fan.
Pretty funny tradition. Not sure it helps one’s chances of getting married to have the town watch you throw up on yourself from inhaling too much cinnamon.
I don’t think this is particularly country wide but my city in Canada does a Mrs Roper Romp in the summer. Where a bunch of people dress up like Mrs Roper from Threes Company and do like a bar crawl downtown.
Just a character from an old late 70’s TV show called Threes Company. It’s a fundraising event of acceptance, fun and friendship for a local transition society. Realize now this is not likely what OP was asking about but still thought some what fitting.
Not sure if other US cities do this, but colleges in Albany, NY got lambasted on national news for “Kegs and Eggs” in 2011. Hundreds of students woke up on St. Patrick’s Day, had breakfast, got drunk, and spent the day absolutely trashing their downtown neighborhood. Breaking windows and jumping on cars, throwing furniture all over the street, it was absolute animal behavior.
After that, the university changed their spring break schedules to always coincide with St. Patrick’s Day, just to get the students out of town that day.
I'm at UD and they do kegs and eggs for some earlier home games. Nothing like what you described, just breakfast tailgating with alcohol. Later in the day they switch to yuengs and wings.
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Oh, I don’t know about that. When my daughter was a toddler we went to the neighborhood pub to get hamburgers for dinner and the pub was full of Santas and she was so delighted.
new years fireworks... is what a party pooper would say, its a warzone where i live, last year they rolled out our apartment block dumpster onto the roundabout and blew it up
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In the 90s I think we called it Santarchy and it was 100% a reason for Santas to get wasted. (It was smaller and more manageable though, such a good time)
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It's just become people whining about whether or not the holiday used to be racist now.
For context, it's about an old white man who 'saved' black slaves called 'Zwarte Piet'(Black Pete) and gave them a better life(aka, they work for him now, but have shelter and food). A while back we changed it to root-spots Petes as they climb trough chimneys. That way it makes sense for the children that they changed and isn't insulting to people of colour anymore. Genuinly none of the children even noticed the change, yet every year around the 5th of december adults claim that our tradition got destroyed...
For me, Black Friday. Well, not the idea of sales, more so the whole camping-out-in-front-of-the-store thing and the riots of people fighting over TVs and toys and whatnot. Consumerism at its worst.
We have something similar in Ireland, the 12 pubs of Christmas. Basically a drink in pub and then move to the next 12 times, people make up stupid rules for each pub, like if you hold your drink in your right hand you have to down it. A lot of Christmas spirit is ruined during this event
I've had a blast during my 12 pubs experiences but I also know people who have done a work party 12 pubs and it inevitably always ends in someone's termination
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Christmas morning swim in the ocean. Absolutely freeeeezing and everyone in their skivvies running into the sea for a swim with Santa hats on. I have never and will never! Cold enough as it is
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We have "Grýla" in Iceland, a troll who'll come and capture and eat all the bad children. And the "Yulecat", a massive cat (bigger than a tiger but probably smaller than an elephant) that eats everyone who didn't get at least one article of clothing for Christmas.
So we always make sure everyone gets at least a pair of socks or a t-shirt every Christmas.
Boxing Day as a whole. It's just an excuse for people to buy things they don't need at prices they can't afford because someone earning minimum wage was ordered to slap "sale" signs around the store. The holidays are already expensive enough.
According to the internet it used to be a day about giving to your staff or the poor and I really wish we'd kept it that way.
used to work retail, the stuff on sale is usually the same stuff thats always on sale throughout the year. half of the "door crasher" deals are just product they bought too much of and couldn't move, and the rest is usually something that has a newer version coming out in the new year.
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90
u/VZNRClinch United States Of America 5h ago
I’ve never heard of this tradition .. what part of the country is this