Brewer, a journalist by trade, made a robot costume for 2009’s SantaCon that proved so popular he decided to upgrade it to the ultimate Santabot 2.0. He also set out to make a short documentary about his adventure, called “Santas on the Move,” to find out what SantaCon is all about. He crowd-funded the project through Kickstarter, raising more than $2,600 to cover costs, and will release the documentary under a Creative Commons license, with no plans to sell.

“Other than following some guy running around with a candy cane on a pole yelling, ‘Santa’s on the move,’ you don’t really know,” says the 25-year-old Brewer of the mystery of how SantaCon came to be. (The event’s organizer Santas are notoriously press-shy.)

Perhaps Brewer’s project was destiny: He grew up in the town of — no kidding — North Pole, Alaska.

“It’s all Christmas, all the time there,” he says. “The streetlights are big candy canes, they have an official year-round Kris Kringle…. If you dropped SantaCon people there, their heads would explode.”

Santabot 2.0 Functions from Nick Brewer on Vimeo.

Brewer’s girlfriend and crew member, Shayna Hawkins, who also grew up there, added that when letters are sent to North Pole addressed to Santa, many are handed off to town middle-schoolers, who begrudgingly answer them. Says Brewer: “It was all very mechanical — ‘Yeah, hi, if you’re good I’ll try to get you that Huffy.’ For me growing up there, Christmas had lost its luster.”

On the other hand, SantaCon participants’ creativity astounded him. Mummy Santa, Marie Antionette Santa, Hanukkah Harry, Penis Santa (who Hawkins thought was funny until he started really acting like a dick, stopping traffic to hump SUVs).

Construction of Brewer’s Santabot outfit took about a month, not including the crash course in using an Arduino board for the electronics. Arcade-style buttons on his chest controlled various features, including lights, voice-changer (“Destroy! Destroy!”), sound system, LOL shield (scrolling, “What is love?” along with holiday messages) and the well-loved but short-lived candy dish that emerged from his 8-bit belly.

People got a little rough on the cardboard at times, but overall Santabot was mobbed with admirers, so much so that Brewer didn’t even make it to the main SantaCon convergence area at Central Park’s Bethesda Fountain.

“We got so bogged down with people and pictures it got to the point we couldn’t make it across the street,” Brewer said.

Unfortunately, the design of his suit was such that he couldn’t raise a beer to his mouth. “But,” Hawkins said, “he never refused a picture the whole day.”

In the evening, Brewer dropped off the outfit at his office and went back down to the West Village to join in one of 12 different prearranged parties at bars. He never found out the inner workings of the mysterious SantaCon machine, but says that won’t affect his film much.

“We’d met other people curious about who puts it on, and that’s when we realized that’s part of the mystique, no need to dwell on it,” Brewer said. “Just seeing the sheer joy that it brought people, us having a blast doing it…. It’s something we can share with the 10,000 other people who were at SantaCon this year, who we know will get something out of it.”

Let’s add this up: A young man grows up disenchanted with Christmas, and goes on a quest to uncover a Christmas mystery and perhaps speak to a “real” Santa Claus. It doesn’t go as planned, but he brings a gift of joy to others through his creative quest. He then discovers — and here’s where we choke back the rising nog and dive right into the world of the daytime-TV Christmas special — that in a way, he is Santa Claus! And therefore, we are Santa Claus.

Whoa. After that, Santabot totally deserves a beer.

Santabot 2.0’s Condition After 2 Hours from Nick Brewer on Vimeo.

See Also:

• SantaCon Is Comin' to Town — Download the Holiday Handbook
• Truckloads of Freaks, Strippers, Art and Noodles Drive NYC's Lost Market
• How Wired.com Built Beer Robot, Our DIY Kegerator

Authors: Dan Glass

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