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Friday Slide Show: SantaCon
19 December 2025
The official SantaCon site explains, "A SantaCon is a convention of santas -- groups of men and women dressed like Santa.... It's one of the few chances left for adults to be silly without any kind of agenda."
We're great apologists for being silly, although we try to keep our enthusiasm for that away from our wardrobe. But, like other homo sapiens, we don't mind watching others indulge.
And last Saturday we found ourselves at Union Square where a convention of Santas was being held to collect toys for the SF Firefighters Toy Program.
We'd followed two girls wearing black boots, short skits and white-fur trimmed red tops up the street to the convention. They stopped a block short to put on their Santa hats, using a store display window for a mirror and giggling over their new look.
Being silly, that is.
The square itself was packed with Santas. And a few other characters. Some of the more fancifully dressed, sometimes including couples, were happy to pose for pictures. There was a great deal of posing, we noticed, particularly in front of the big tree in the square.
Big silly smiles on everyone as they posed.
We stuck to candids. We were shooting with our public outfit: the Nikon D200 and unrepaired 18-200mm Nikkor. We've vowed not to be distressed if anything happened to either of them even if we've grown quite fond of them. There is something about that D200's CCD that our CMOS cameras can't duplicate.
But then, that's just us being silly.
