If Halloween is your favorite holiday, the Menagerie Oddities Yuletide Market on the Winchester Mystery House grounds is the holiday fair for you. The Winchester House — curious, odd and macabre in its own right —is an ideal venue for the fair and its odd and lovely wares.
It’s Día de los Muertos meets The Night Before Christmas.
All of the products and art on sale are hand-crafted, and much of it is one-of-a-kind. There’s plenty that’s macabre if that’s your taste. Werewolf teddy bears. Taxidermy art, including no-animal-used-in-production vegan pieces. Ceramic red mushroom ornaments for your tree (amanita muscaria, hallucinogenic and toxic). Skulls abound in every form, from holiday ornaments to soap and sugar cubes.
In the same spirit, there’s plenty of entertainment from off-beat jugglers and acrobats and special guests like The Grinch, Beetlejuice and Scrooge’s three Christmas Ghosts. Three Tipsy Catlady Carolers warble — meow? — favorites like “Wreck the Halls.” And every Saturday, Krampus stands in for St. Nick — a cauldron for bad children at his side, where you can step in and have your picture taken with the good-natured humanoid goat demon.
But it’s not just Winchester House’s spooky atmosphere that makes it a perfect setting for Oddities Yuletide Fair. The Victorian and Edwardian aesthetics of the house are shared by many of the artists, who use antique objects from the late 19th and early 20th centuries as raw materials for their creations. Much of the jewelry is repurposed from 1920s jewelry, while clothing is based on similarly vintage pieces.
Warewise Rituals searches antique and thrift stores for vintage tea cups and glass bowls and goblets for their hand-poured scented candles. And when the candle burns down, you have a piece of lovely antique glass.
Jena Douglass, owner of La Plume Noir, sells handmade jewelry using vintage supplies from the 1920s to 1960s. Kellye Nowicki-Chun restores vintage jewelry, combining pieces from different eras into new creations. Stained glass artist Emily Anne inherited her grandmother’s collection of porcelain dolls (antique reproductions from the 1990s) and creates pieces that combine the two.
Menagerie Oddities founder Connstance Garcia launched the market in 2016, when she was trying to find a vendor to show her doll art.
“That’s why I started the menagerie because I couldn’t sell my art,” Garcia said. “I tried street fairs; I went down to LA all year.”
In LA, Garcia met another doll artist from the Bay Area and the pair decided to put on a Bay Area show for offbeat art.
The first show was at the Elks Lodge in Alameda, and the market became such a success that it quickly became a fulltime job for Garcia. Menagerie now puts on events throughout California, including World Goth Day in the Bay Area.
At Menagerie Oddities events, you won’t see mass-produced items, mainstream commercial themes — no Disney — or vendor competition. Everything is handmade.
“It’s a very curated market,” said Garcia, who doesn’t just wait for applications to sell but searches out interesting artists and craftspeople. “I’ll see a vendor online, or I’ll meet a vendor, and I look at their items. If they complement the other vendors, that’s what I’m looking for. It’s about community, not simply selling things.”
Saint Nick’s folkloric sidekick, Krampus, is the guest of honor here. But instead of fright, this Krampus puts smiles on children’s faces.
Krampus, when not on the job, is Phil Burgess, an electronics engineer from Fremont. Burgess was already interested in events like Comic Con, where it seemed to him that “the characters were having a lot more fun than I was, so wanted to get into it.”
But Krampus had a special attraction for him.
“An artist friend of mine had done this drawing of Krampus that I just thought was the neatest thing, said Burgess. “The more I learned about the Krampus folklore, I liked that it was a departure from the very commercial view of Krampus.
“Each little village in Bavaria, Germany, Austria has a Krampus story,” Burgess continued. “He accompanies St. Nicholas. Krampus is subservient to St. Nicholas, shown by his chains and bells.”
St. Nicholas rewards the good children, while Krampus, who, if the children are very bad, beats them or drags them down to Hell. (In some traditions, he eats them, hence his kettle).
“What I really liked about it is that he’s not indiscriminately evil. He doesn’t just do this to everyone,” said Burgess. “He only punishes wicked people. And I kind of like that.”
Burgess’ attraction to this idea of justice comes out of personal experience.
“I was a nerdy kid, and I got bullied a lot. In a way, he’s [Krampus] a protector. He whisks those bad people off. There’s justice,” said Burgess. “So that’s the version of Krampus that I like to hear about and that I try to perform. He’s not the bad guy.”
Menagerie Oddities Yuletide Market is open Dec. 14, 21, 28 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Winchester House. On Dec. 21, Dacre Stoker, great-grandnephew of Dracula author Bram Stoker, will be on hand.
Tickets are about $7, and you can buy online. House tour tickets are sold separately at winchestermysteryhouse.com/tours/. Friday, Dec. 13 will be a special Winchester House flashlight tour, 6:30 – 11:59 p.m.
For more holiday activities, www.svvoice.com/celebrate-the-holidays-2024.
