Our correspondent follows Father Christmas into a 2am crowd that mistook him for the night’s most committed costume
He Was Just Passing Through
To be clear, Santa did not mean to end up at a warehouse rave. He was, by his own account, simply passing through Shoreditch on Christmas Eve, completing his deliveries, when he descended a chimney that turned out to belong to a converted warehouse currently hosting what the flyer described as an immersive sonic journey and what everyone else would describe as a rave. By the time he realized his error, he had been spotted, and in Shoreditch, being spotted in a full Santa outfit at 2am means precisely one thing: you are the most committed costume in the room, and you are about to be photographed by everyone.
The North Pole dispatches confirm Santa rarely lingers, his schedule being famously tight. But the warehouse crowd, fortified by the night and convinced they had encountered the evening’s greatest dresser, would not let him leave, and Santa, ever gracious, found himself the unexpected centre of a 2am Shoreditch dancefloor, posing for photographs with strangers who genuinely believed he was a man who had really committed to the theme.
The Commitment Was Admired
You have to understand the Shoreditch relationship to a costume. We respect commitment above almost all things. A man in a half-hearted Santa hat is nothing; a man in a full, authentic, magnificently bearded Father Christmas outfit, at 2am, in a warehouse, is a legend, a hero, the person everyone wants a photograph with. The crowd assumed Santa had spent the evening sourcing a vintage costume and growing out his beard for the occasion, and they admired him for it enormously, which is the highest honour Shoreditch can bestow.
Santa, who had not sourced anything and whose beard is simply his beard, accepted the admiration with characteristic warmth, posing for photograph after photograph, never once explaining that he was the actual article. Nightlife coverage via the Time Out London guide has documented Shoreditch’s warehouse scene extensively, and the crowd that night was, by all accounts, a representative sample: beautiful, exhausted, and entirely convinced that the real Santa was a particularly dedicated reveller. Event listings at the regional events register promote dozens of such nights.
The Best Costume Award
At some point, inevitably, there was a best-costume moment, an impromptu acclamation by the crowd, and Santa, the genuine article, was declared the winner over a man dressed as a traffic cone and a woman who had come as the concept of regret. He accepted the honour graciously. He did not point out that he could not, strictly speaking, win a costume contest, not being in costume. He simply smiled, posed for more photographs, and allowed Shoreditch to celebrate him for a commitment to authenticity that was, in his case, total, because he was not committed to authenticity. He was authenticity.
This is, I think, the perfect Shoreditch story, and I have not stopped enjoying it. The real Santa, the actual man, won a Shoreditch costume contest by being himself, defeating dozens of people performing the authenticity he simply possesses. The crowd never knew. They photographed the genuine article believing it to be the finest fake, which is so perfectly Shoreditch that I could weep. Cultural context via the London Evening Standard captures the scene’s obsession with the authentic. Heritage analysis at the heritage society would simply call him the real thing.
He Slipped Away
Santa eventually slipped away, as he does, around the point when the immersive sonic journey reached its most immersive and the crowd was too lost in it to notice his departure. He had deliveries to complete, an entire city of children still waiting, and a warehouse rave, however flattering, was not on the schedule. He left behind a hundred photographs, a best-costume title he never claimed, and a crowd who would tell the story for years of the man who really, really committed to the Santa look. Retail and event records at the public registry log the night as one of the season’s busiest.
The Authentic Article
I have thought a lot about that night, because it distils something I find both funny and slightly profound about my neighbourhood. Shoreditch worships authenticity and almost never encounters it, surrounded as we are by performances of the real thing, costumes of commitment, beards of irony, baos of fusion. And then the actual authentic article wanders in, by accident, down a chimney, and we celebrate it as the finest performance of all, never suspecting that it is not a performance at all.
There is a lesson in that, about how completely we have lost the ability to tell the genuine from the performed, the real beard from the cultivated one, the actual Santa from the man who has really committed to the look. The crowd that night gave their highest honour to the one truly authentic figure in the room, for reasons exactly opposite to the truth. They thought he was the best fake. He was simply real, and in Shoreditch, real has become so rare that we no longer recognize it when it descends a chimney into our midst.
For those drawn to the Shoreditch warehouse scene, the listings at the public registry will point you toward the season’s nights, and they are, genuinely, often wonderful. And for those who would rather experience the season without an immersive sonic journey or a 2am best-costume contest, the games at the diversions index are free, well-lit, and require no commitment to any look whatsoever.
The photographs from that night are, I am told, still circulating, captioned with admiration for the man’s dedication. Nobody knows they were photographing Father Christmas. Nobody ever will. Santa flew north before dawn, his deliveries complete, leaving Shoreditch to celebrate the finest costume it had ever seen, which was not a costume, worn by the most committed reveller it had ever met, who was not a reveller, who was simply, briefly, gloriously real, passing through on his way to give the rest of the city its gifts.
SOURCE: https://santaclaus.top
