AlcoTop

An Xmas pub crawl drinking cap — a hat with an Arduino in it, built to light the winter. LEDs on the crown, a controller in the band, and the whole thing worn into the cold as a beacon of good intent.

The pub crawl is the modern rite of midwinter: a procession that stops at every door that owes it cheer, moving from hearth to hearth through the longest night of the year. The cap is the procession’s banner — wearable, Arduino-lit, and visible from a suspicious distance.

It exists because in December every procession needs a light source, and someone has to be the one wearing it.

The Wild Hunt rides at midwinter — every tradition of the cold north agrees on this, whatever names they give the riders — and the hunt’s one law, older than any of its riders, is that it stops at doors. Door by door, hearth by hearth, the procession takes its cheer where it is owed and moves on; and the wise household lights a lamp so the riders know which doors are friendly. The Irish pub crawl is the hunt’s domestic descendant: twelve stops, small hearths, the same cold, the same singing, roughly the same casualty rate. In 2013 the garden decided someone on the crawl should carry a light for the procession, and a light you wear is a banner, and a banner on a head is a hat. So the hat was built — Arduino in the band, LEDs in the crown, the whole rite of midwinter worn like a bishop’s mitre of good intent — and worn down the street of an Athlone December from door to door. Every procession needs someone foolish enough to be lit, say the old stories, and the moss grew on this stone from the spilt cheer of eleven doors and the twelfth one refused.