Hundreds of Santas, elves, reindeer \u2013 and a few trees \u2013 pub-crawled through Pacific Beach on Saturday, Dec. 8 to spread holiday cheer and spirits while donating gifts and raising funds for Toys for Tots. “It has been an amazing turnout,” said Rachel Boles, who organized this year\u2019s SantaCon, after restarting the tradition in Pacific Beach in 2017. “Last year, we had about 100 people. This year we had more than 400 come out.” All those somewhat-sauced Santas donated more than 200 toys and raised more than $2,000 for the Toy for Tots program. “I\u2019m going to be buying a lot of toys for children,” Boles said. “I\u2019m really happy about that.”
\nThey also filled restaurants and bars \u2013 Tavern at the Beach, Mavericks Beach Club, The Local PB, and Sandbox Pizza \u2013 spreading more green around for service workers during a normally slow Saturday. “These places are packed on what is usually a dead Saturday because people are busy with the holidays and college football\u2019s not on,” said Boles, who works for US Foods and has many contacts in the service industry. Boles, who\u2019s originally from south New Jersey, said she was surprised there wasn\u2019t an active SantaCon in Pacific Beach when she moved to San Diego. “It\u2019s huge on the East Coast and in other West Coast cities like San Francisco and LA. I know it gets a bad rap at times, but last year we had no incidents. Hopefully, this year everything goes well.” Boles said that most people she meets are also San Diego transplants with no family here, so they rely on friends during the holidays. “This event is a big deal for me because I can\u2019t always go back east to visit family at Christmas. A lot of these people here can\u2019t either, which is why spending time with your friends is so important \u2013 we become family. And today, we\u2019re also helping out other families so they can have a wonderful Christmas,” Boles said.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hundreds of Santas, elves, reindeer \u2013 and a few trees \u2013 pub-crawled through Pacific Beach on Saturday, Dec. 8 to spread holiday cheer and spirits while donating gifts and raising funds for Toys for Tots. “It has been an amazing turnout,” said Rachel Boles, who organized this year\u2019s SantaCon, after restarting the tradition in Pacific […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":726,"featured_media":280789,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"11559","_seopress_titles_title":"Ho Ho Ho-ing for a good cause \u2013 Pacific Beach SantaCon donates to Toys for Tots","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11559,11551],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-280788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-beach-bay-press","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/726"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280788"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280788\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/280789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}