Today there was the annual running of the mostly nude Santa Clauses through Back Bay.  What??  You missed this?  You weren’t aware that something so weird, delightful and downright insane was going on?  Well, it was.

Every year a ragtag bunch of people gets liquored up at a bar in Back Bay and then runs out into the street, where a bunch of people with camera wait for them.  Then they do a circuit around Back Bay and run back to the bar.  I even thought about doing this a couple of years ago, but I didn’t want to get hypothermia.  I prefer to get frost bite and hypothermia when I go skiing, like you know, a normal person.

I guess this is the spot to get slightly philosophical and give me minute while I do.  The Santa Speedo run signifies the beginning of the holiday season, where one hopes for good gifts and thinks about what the new year will bring.  I think of the same.

As a kid, like most kids, I loved Christmas.  When I was a teenager, I started hating it, but then again, most things went dark at that age.  When I was 14, we went to spend some kind of post Christmas time with my uncle.  Now this was kinda revolutionary, considering all of my family lives in Poland.  My uncle was here with his family temporarily.  I had really wanted some Guess Jeans that year.  That was kind of the rage that year of course and my uncle said he had some Christmas presents for us.  It turned out to be markers and different types of highlighters, with the price tags still on them.  I learned at that moment to never rely on Christmas to make me happy.

Somehow in the past few years, Christmas has become a very happy time for me after a long time of it not exactly being that way.  Christmas was for me for a long time an excuse to go home for a few days and not generally be too happy for too long but that all changed a couple of years ago.  I started to participate a lot more in the planning and just celebrate the holiday a lot more.  I also realized that giving gifts is a lot better than receiving them.

Anyway, enough Christmas.  Let’s look at some pictures of some mostly unclothed crazy people running through a snowstorm, shall we?