18 Days – 18 Bars

There are 18 days remaining until we kick off the Santa Crawl on Dec 14th. Since there are 18 bars participating in the Crawl, I’ve decided to highlight a different establishment every day from now until the day of the event. This seems like a perfectly logical way to thank each of the participating pubs for their assistance in making this event come off successful.

We’ll start off this countdown with our traditional starting spot, Kildare’s.

We start at Kildare’s for several reasons.

The first is tradition. In 2003, SantaLar donned a Santa suit to crash the Hooter’s Christmas party (who’s going to toss Santa Claus out of a holiday party?). That little escapade evolved into the first Santa Crawl a year later, when four of my friends suited up and joined me for the first official Santa Crawl. If Santa’s looking for girls to sit in his lap, what better place to start than Hooters? Kildare’s took over the east College Avenue Hooter’s location in 2010 but for tradition sake, we decided to continue to kick off the Crawl there.

The second reason is logistical. If you are going to have a pub Crawl, there really needs to be some sort of logical progression between the bars in order to maintain some sense of order. In State College, that’s typically one of two choices, either east to west, or west to east. Kildare’s lies at the easternmost point of the reasonable walking zone of downtown bars, so maintaining it as the starting point made logistical sense.

The last reason is one of practicality. The staff at Kildare’s has been extremely supportive of the Santa Crawl. They have gone out of there way to support our effort through the years. Some of the special things they’ve done have included: reserving the back room for the crawlers, promoting the Crawl both in their radio commercials and on their front board, supplying us with the wristbands that we’ve used to identify those who’ve contributed to our cause, selling wristbands, safekeeping the funds until we can collect them. They are old hands at running events, so I have no worry about things kicking off smoothly down there.

Thanks again to all the Kildare’s staff.