It used to be that Santa Claus made a list of who’s been bad and who’s been good. Now, Santa himself is sometimes more naughty than nice.

Bad Santa is coming to town, as talent-booking services offer Clauses who, to the surprise of many guests, agree to show up smelling of booze, complaining about the food and hurling presents. Unruly Santas are also taking to the streets in dozens of cities around the US as part of a spreading underground event in which revellers dressed in the full red regalia embark on rowdy pub crawls.

While he’s unlikely to overtake the traditional Saint Nick, the surly, bad-tempered Santa is making inroads. In Seattle, the Live Wires entertainment service says actor Rafe Wadleigh’s drunken Santa will make a holiday party “more Tim Burton than Burl Ives”. In Las Vegas, the Tao Nightclub at the ornate hotel The Venetian is hosting its second annual Bad Santa Party tomorrow; photos from last year’s event depict bare-chested men wearing fake antlers and women showing off red-and-white underwear.

Actor Allan Richards figures he’s played the jolly old elf hundreds of times over the past 15 years, but he took the role to a new level at a San Francisco law firm’s holiday party a few years back. He spilled drinks on himself and on guests. He bellied up to the buffet tables and dumped vegetables and chicken into his giant gift sack. He dropped his pants on the dance floor, revealing a pair of crimson shorts. People stared, and one partner had to be calmed by a junior associate.

Eventually, he says, guests caught on. And when he reverted to type and began leading carols an hour or so later, he sensed some disappointment. “I don’t think they really wanted me to become the boring, traditional, ‘ho-ho-ho’, Merry Christmas, regular stuffed-shirt Santa,” says the 65-year-old Mr. Richards. “I think they were having too much fun with me as the overly outrageous, over-the-top, totally off-the-wall kind of Santa.”

Stan Heimowitz, whose California booking company Celebrity Gems sent Mr. Richards to the party, says he sent seven Bad Santas to holiday bashes last year, up from four of them five years ago. He expects more bookings this year. While customers can have a traditional Santa drop by for $175, the mischievous versions — he calls them “fractured Santas” — cost $600 for a half hour, because the roles require more improvisation.

Bookers say the interest in alternative Santas was piqued by the 2003 movie “Bad Santa”, in which Billy Bob Thornton’s department-store Claus curses, vomits, picks up women and steals from his employers. Such portrayals are in line with the way adults have added an edgy spin to traditionally children-centred holidays such as Halloween. (After introducing a “Santa Baby” outfit last year, Victoria’s Secret tripled its initial order this year for the $64 bra, miniskirt and faux-fur-trimmed hat ensemble.) It’s also a way to express disenchantment with an increasingly commercialised holiday.

“There’s all this forced cheer at Christmastime that we’re all so sick of, so it makes sense that there’s a rebellion,” says Maud Lavin, editor of “The Business of Holidays” and professor of visual and critical arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. For Ms Lavin, the idea of a Bad Santa evokes photos of children sitting on a mall employee’s lap and crying hysterically in fear. “Of all the things that were forced on us during the holidays, he’s the one that could actually be scary.”

Mo Donahue, owner of Party Crashers Entertainment in Minneapolis, got the inspiration five years ago, when, in desperation, she hired an unfamiliar actor for a holiday party. He showed up in a sulky, unprofessional mood, and guests complained afterward that he wouldn’t even say “ho, ho, ho”. “They kept referring to him as this surly Santa,” Ms Donahue says. “And I thought, ‘That could be a really funny idea’.”

In 2002, Ms Donahue began offering a Bad Santa for singing telegrams and party visits. It was slow to catch on the first year, she says, but since then about one-third of her Santa bookings each holiday season have been deliberately cranky characters. Her Bad Santa, whose services start at $110 for 15 minutes, sings Christmas carols with unprintable lyrics, breaks down in tears or perhaps throws gifts across the room. Clients decide ahead of time how shocking they want his behaviour to be. The company also offers a “trophy bride” Mrs. Claus in a fur-trimmed red mini-dress and a blond wig. “It has to be the right crowd,” says Ms Donahue.

Noreen Requiro thought the Bad Santa at her party went too far. Last Saturday, Ms Requiro and her colleagues at Extended Day Child Care Center Inc., a Northern California day-care operator, dressed up for a party in the ballroom of the Wyndham Garden Hotel in Pleasanton, California. As they circulated, she says, the Santa her company had hired sat on guests’ laps, flipped candy across tables and made lewd comments to some of the women. “He was a little obnoxious,” said Ms Requiro, a company director. “I didn’t really even want to be near him, because it was uncomfortable. I didn’t eat my candy.”

When told that the Santa had been instructed to act off-colour, she responded: “I had no idea. We were thinking, ‘Has this guy been drinking?’ It just seemed odd for the type of occasion.”

The iconic version of Santa — jolly, generous and dressed in a red suit — was shaped mostly in the US in the 19th century, through Thomas Nast illustrations and Clement C. Moore’s poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas”. Department stores and candy stores also used the image to help push products. Mythical gift-giving figures are deeply rooted, going back to winter solstice celebrations that predate Christianity, says Carl Anderson, a psychologist who has researched the character’s history.

Dr. Anderson, who has also played Santa for 18 years at the NorthPark Center mall in Dallas, says subversive Santas play fast and loose with an iconic image. “It doesn’t sit well with me,” he says. “After all my years of doing Santa I have a deeper appreciation of what he represents, which is hope.”

But Santa also has a shadowy side that dates back hundreds of years — a figure who not only rewards good children, but also punishes bad ones. Many frightening characters in European folklore were said to roam during dark winter nights, according to “Encyclopaedia of Christmas” by cultural anthropologist Tanya Gulevich. These may have been holdovers from pagan figures that were incorporated into the newer Christmas holiday. While St. Nicholas has long been considered a gift-giver, he was said to be accompanied by a demon called a “cert” in Czechoslovakia, by a stern Black Peter in Holland and, in German-speaking countries, by the punisher Knecht Ruprecht.

In the 18th century, the Pennsylvania Dutch imported the character of “Pelz Nicholas”, a menacing, ragged figure who trailed St. Nicholas, punishing the badly behaved. His name eventually shortened to “Belsnickel”, and in the 19th century, young men practised “Belsnickeling” — dressing in rags or furs, hiding their faces and performing comic routines for neighbours who tried to guess their identities.

Belsnickeling died out in the early 20th century. But today it has been reincarnated, in a sense, in Santacon, an annual event in which participants drink, wander the streets, hand out candy to kids and sing Christmas carols with racy lyrics. The first gathering, in 1994, involved several dozen Santas romping through downtown San Francisco, taking a cable car and passing through Macy’s. Around midnight, one red-suited partier donned a body harness and pretended to be hanged from the scaffolding outside a downtown hotel.

Though Santacon has no central planners — the events are also known as Santarchy, with past participants using pseudonyms such as Santa Squid — revellers are urged to dress like Santa, and go easy on kids and police. The event has spread to Helsinki, London and Tokyo, plus dozens of US cities including Portland, Oregon; Tulsa, Oklahoma and Addison, Texas, according to Santarchy.com, which maintains the event’s history, schedule and songbook. (One lyric: “Oh you better break out//The Bourbon and Rye//Tequila and Gin//I’m telling you why//Santa is invading your town”.)

In Chicago last Friday night, about 60 Santas spent several hours at a neighbourhood bar, then squeezed into two rented trolleys that ferried them downtown. Around 10 p.m., they gathered outside the local ABC affiliate, where the evening news is broadcast behind a plate-glass window that allows spectators to watch.

As they waited in the frigid darkness, the group began chanting, “Here we go, Santa, here we go!” The anchors tried to shush them, but the noise only grew louder when a group dressed as Vikings appeared and, for no obvious reason, began menacing the Santas. When a rumour spread through the crowd that police were coming, the Santas decamped for nearby Millennium Park.

There, a 28-year-old who identified himself as Freddy Biletnikoff expressed surprise that most bystanders had been approving. “This is supposed to be counterculture, but people love it,” he said. “We went to Macy’s earlier, and the security guards seemed reluctant when they threw us out.”

If Bad Santa is already gaining acceptance, the next logical step in Christmas shock may be ... Dead Santa. Last year Gary Payne, producer of the Capital City Mystery Players in Austin, Texas, wrote a dinner-theatre show called “Bad Santa”, held at a Spaghetti Warehouse restaurant. In the show, Santa has lost his magical powers, and he’s trying to recover the toy business from his ex-wife. (It doesn’t end well for him.) “I’ve been told that I look like Billy Bob Thornton,” says Mr. Payne, who played Santa. He plans to rewrite the ending for “Bad Santa” and revive it next year.

Last week, Ruth Ann Dickensheets hired Mr. Payne’s group for a Christmas party for the Austin engineering consultancy that she owns with her husband. At the party, held in an antebellum mansion, the actor playing Santa chugged from a bottle of whiskey while he handed out gag gifts. His elf wore a red leather outfit with white Dalmatian-spotted boots. In the middle of the event, Santa staggered out the door and, as the group watched, keeled over in the middle of the lawn. Then the guests had to solve the crime from a set of clues. “A lot of the comments and dialogue in the mystery were borderline risque, but it was an adult party,” says Ms Dickensheets, who was eventually fingered as the killer.