WEBSUM: Santa Fest creator Colin O’Grady hopes the celebration continues throughout the years and puts importance on canned food donations for Athens Food Pantry.
WEBHED: Santa Fest brings holiday cheer, canned food drive on Saturday
It might not be as crazy as Number Fest, but the second annual Santa Fest is sure to be a lot more jolly.
Colin O’Grady, a 2014 graduate of Ohio University, started Santa Fest, which takes place on the Saturday before finals week and encourages people to wear their most festive gear and Santa suits. But it’s not just about running through Uptown in holiday attire; the event solicits canned food donations at Uptown bars for the Athens Food Pantry.
O’Grady said he wanted to make a mark on the campus by localizing a time-honored tradition in places like New York City and Chicago where citizens take to the streets in Santa suits and bar hop.
“We were like we should try to bring this to Athens and just see how many people we can get to do it and whoever shows up, it’s fine, we will just wear Santa suits and go to the bars,” he said.
Through advertising it on Facebook and then having help from an employee of The Pigskin Bar, roommates and friends, more people than O’Grady originally thought showed up. A lot of the publicity now comes through its Twitter: @SantaFestOU.
“I remember late in the night just looking around and thinking ‘holy crap, there are a lot of people out here and they’re all wearing Christmas stuff,’ ” O’Grady said. “And that was pretty cool.”
O’Grady said he really wants to up the number of donations to the Athens Food Pantry this year.
“If you could just grab them out of your cupboards and bring them to the bars that day that’d be great,” he said.
O’Grady said as a student who experienced OU on both quarters and semesters, before the switch, no one could really celebrate the holidays because Winter Break would commence after Thanksgiving.
Jenny Alu, bar manager at The Pigskin Bar, said she helped O’Grady with organization this year. She worked the day last year and the bar, for the most part, consistently stayed busy throughout the night.
“It was kind of one of those days where we were really busy from like noon until like 8 o’clock and then it kind of died down after that but it wasn’t like a substantial decrease in people,” Alu said. “People pretty much stayed out all night and I’m expecting it to hopefully be bigger this year.”
Brandon “DJ B-Funk” Thompson also will be performing at Pigskin starting at 1 p.m. on Saturday. He was not in town last year for Santa Fest, but has attended another Santa Fest in Atlanta.
Thompson said he will be mixing up his normal playlist with holiday songs and remixes.
“I’m heavily involved in Halloween, and it’s kind of like Halloween but for Christmas. It’s all just celebration. It’s another reason for people to be creative and have a good time,” Thompson said.
O’Grady said he knows he probably won’t see everyone dressed in a Santa suit because of costs, but he hopes to see the tradition he started to stay alive.
“I hope the canned food drive stays a tradition,” O’Grady said. “I really hope this is something that goes on for years and years to come and that we don’t have to promote it at all; it’s just a fest year that every knows that the Saturday before finals, it’s Santa Fest.”
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