It’s December! This month is one of our favorites (let’s be honest, we love almost every month for some reason or another) because of all the holiday festivities. And of course, we find ways to incorporate costumes!
This Saturday, Dec. 14, is the fourth annual SantaCon, and we’re excited to participate again. SantaCon is a “conference of Santas,” or better known as a pub crawl of Santas.
Anyone (of legal age, of course) is welcome to participate in this event! All that’s required is a Santa suit or other holiday attire. A Santa hat is not enough, you need to put a little more effort into it!
The Santas are invited to gather at the Sandbar starting at 3 p.m. on Saturday (or earlier, if you like– we open at 1) for a little holiday cheer. The pub crawl will then head down Mass Street to the Granada around 4, followed by a stop at Red Lyon and ending at the Bottleneck in time for the KU basketball game at 6 p.m.
SantaCon is a ton of fun, but it’s also a charitable event. Santas are asked to bring donations for Ballard Community Services and Lawrence Humane Society. Cash, of course, is preferred but there’s also a list of most-wanted items for each agency on the SantaCon website.
And if you have kids, bring them downtown to see the Santas! We promise, it’s not a drunken mess like you might imagine a pub crawl to be. It’s a jolly good time with Christmas carols and bells and lots of holiday cheer. We just happen to enjoy a few drinks along the way!
We had a nearly fatal incident at the Sandbar on Christmas night.
Blair offered to open the bar at 7 p.m. that night. Shortly after he arrived at the bar, Dave got a phone call. Something was wrong with the power, so he went down to the bar to check it out. (I should add that usually, Dave isn't in town for Christmas. Fortunately, he was awaiting the arrival of his son, so he was in town this year.)
Dave's pretty good with electrical stuff but he couldn't figure out the problem. The lights in the bar came on, but then part of them would dim or go out. Worse, the fish tank in the back room had already started to overflow due to the lack of power.
They called Westar, and a technician showed up at the bar pretty quickly to solve the problem. Turns out, there was a loose wire on the power line that's connected to the bar. We were only getting power to half of our circuit box. Something Dave would have never figured out, and he certainly wouldn't have been able to fix.
The technicial fixed the line and the power was fully restored. And most importantly, the Sandbar fish lived.
Big thanks to Westar for sending a technician out so quickly, especially on Christmas!
We love our Sandbar shirts, and we especially love finding old-school shirts from the early days. Fortunately, Dave is a packrat and held on to many of his shirts from the 90's, shirts that many of you have probably never seen.
These days, most of our T-shirts are solid-colored logo shirts. Back then, we mostly sold white T-shirts with cool designs on the back. It was also pre-official-logo time, so the now-familiar tiki head is nowhere to be found on these shirts.
For Christmas, Dave and I had a T-shirt quilt made for Sandbar founder Peach. It's made up of 21 Sandbar shirts through the years and includes a shirt from the ill-fated Jimmy Buffett concert bus trip to Denver, the original latitude & longitude shirt and some of our newer shirts.
Here's a picture:
How many shirts do you recognize?
The quilt's not quite done; our friend Nancy put it together but it still needs to be quilted. Nancy did a fantastic job on it and we can't wait to see the finished product!
Typically we post stories on the blog 3-5 times a week. This week, however, we're taking a break.
Dave's having a baby! Well, his wife is. Which means the writer of this blog is unavailable and Dave won't be at the bar much, if at all, to see what's going on and provide stories.
If you've got great bar stories, email them to us at sandbar@thesandbar.com. We're always accepting guest blogs (subject to editor's approval, of course).
And we'll have more stories for you soon, including the one about the wacky Christmas night at the Sandbar.
It wouldn't be a holiday without a Sandbar staff-themed JibJab video.
Feliz Navidad from some of our bartenders:
Personalize funny videos and birthday eCards at JibJab!
And a very bizarre rendition of Winter Wonderland that Andrew will probably hate:
Personalize funny videos and birthday eCards at JibJab!
Have a great holiday season! We'll most likely be open on Christmas Eve and Christmas night, but not until later. It depends on when staff wants to open up. Pay attention to our Facebook page or Twitter account and we'll keep you posted.
The annual Sandbar staff holiday party was Sunday night, and it was fun!
The bar was closed to the public until 9 p.m. so we could treat our staff to food and fun. The always-popular white elephant/gift-stealing game was the highlight of the night, and this year Dave added a twist: in order to steal someone else's gift, you had to answer a question from "Fact or Crap." If you correctly guessed fact or crap, you could steal; if not, you had to pick a new gift.
The first white elephant gift was a box of autographed Turner Gill footballs. It may have gone downhill from there.
Some of the other white elephant gifts included items from last year's gift exchange; an ancient broken scanner; a personal massager; a pink flamingo light; and a three-pack of ladies' camisoles. It's always a strange assortment.
Everyone was encouraged to wear crazy hats, and most of the attendees obliged. We had Santa hats, Viking hats, cowboy hats and sock monkey hats.
And we even had a surprise visitor! Drew, aka "Steel Wolf," a bartender from many years ago, stopped by with his lovely wife.
We opened the bar to the public around 9 p.m. and the party continued the rest of the night. Thanks to all of our staff for the awesome job you do all year round!
