Last Saturday, my friends and I were heading for a subway station in Brooklyn and found ourselves behind a man and a woman both dressed in Santa Claus outfits. They were kind enough to wave us onto the train with a “hurry, hurry!”, and we made it on board just as the subway doors closed. And then we discovered that we were on a subway train filled with people dressed as Santa Claus, noisy but well-behaved. What parallel universe had we mistakenly stepped into? Was there some subway dress code announcement we had missed? Nope. The announcement we missed was for the 2007 New York City SantaCon. (Here they are swarming Grand Central Terminal.)

Many cities are having their SantaCon tomorrow, including Seattle, so if you see roving bands of red-suited revelers, you’ll at least know what’s going on.