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North Pole
I drove to North Pole today, a sentence which I am reliably informed sounds completely off the wall to anyone who's not from around here.
I was out there to take pictures for my Julie Ecker newsletter (the town in the next book is kind of loosely based on it) but I figured I'd also share a few here because North Pole is ... definitely a place. It's kind of industrial, adjacent to a military base, well known as the local primo source for artisanally handcrafted meth, and located in a swamp, but they have a Theme and they are committed.
This sign is located on a roundabout that I had to cross on foot in 3F weather to take a picture, which is a GREAT place for a sign that people are probably going to want to take pictures of, but it's very North Pole to put it there. To give them full credit, in spite of our recent snowfall they had very well-cleared sidewalks.
North Pole also features red and white striped light poles that look like candy canes.
In fact, if there is anything in town that can be red and white striped, it probably is.
But of course I was really there to take pictures of ...
... giant Santa.
Supposedly, at 42 feet, it's the World's Largest Santa Statue. It's located outside the Santa Claus House, which is basically a big Christmas store. I also took some pictures in there, because it's got a lot of themed Christmas trees which include, for example, a gnome tree covered in ornaments consisting entirely of gnomes.
Of course there's more than just gnomes; don't be silly.
There are also approximately a million varieties of snowglobes, Christmas villages, Advent calendars, stuffed toys, whatever's going on with the life-size dioramas up near the ceiling:
... and the entire "putting Christ back in Christmas" corner which includes a whole bunch of Nativity sets. I recently saw a post going around Tumblr about how female cardinals are brown, so if you see two red cardinals on a Christmas card they're a gay couple, which was definitely the right frame of mind for viewing this Nativity:
To be completely fair I coveted a ton of things in here, just barely talked myself out of buying a number of items including a light-up gnome snowglobe and several of the Nativity sets, and walked out with a bag of Christmas kitsch. It's been a while since I was back there and it's just as delightfully batshit as I remembered. They also have reindeer, but I was unable to take any pictures because the reindeer barn was closed to the public for some reason; woe.
I was out there to take pictures for my Julie Ecker newsletter (the town in the next book is kind of loosely based on it) but I figured I'd also share a few here because North Pole is ... definitely a place. It's kind of industrial, adjacent to a military base, well known as the local primo source for artisanally handcrafted meth, and located in a swamp, but they have a Theme and they are committed.
This sign is located on a roundabout that I had to cross on foot in 3F weather to take a picture, which is a GREAT place for a sign that people are probably going to want to take pictures of, but it's very North Pole to put it there. To give them full credit, in spite of our recent snowfall they had very well-cleared sidewalks.
North Pole also features red and white striped light poles that look like candy canes.
In fact, if there is anything in town that can be red and white striped, it probably is.
But of course I was really there to take pictures of ...
... giant Santa.
Supposedly, at 42 feet, it's the World's Largest Santa Statue. It's located outside the Santa Claus House, which is basically a big Christmas store. I also took some pictures in there, because it's got a lot of themed Christmas trees which include, for example, a gnome tree covered in ornaments consisting entirely of gnomes.
Of course there's more than just gnomes; don't be silly.
There are also approximately a million varieties of snowglobes, Christmas villages, Advent calendars, stuffed toys, whatever's going on with the life-size dioramas up near the ceiling:
... and the entire "putting Christ back in Christmas" corner which includes a whole bunch of Nativity sets. I recently saw a post going around Tumblr about how female cardinals are brown, so if you see two red cardinals on a Christmas card they're a gay couple, which was definitely the right frame of mind for viewing this Nativity:
To be completely fair I coveted a ton of things in here, just barely talked myself out of buying a number of items including a light-up gnome snowglobe and several of the Nativity sets, and walked out with a bag of Christmas kitsch. It's been a while since I was back there and it's just as delightfully batshit as I remembered. They also have reindeer, but I was unable to take any pictures because the reindeer barn was closed to the public for some reason; woe.
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