Key Highlights
- Print The Sawdust Art Festival started in the mid-1960s as a reaction to — or a “rebellion,” as one of the participating artists put it — Laguna Beach’s more uppity Festival of the Arts, home to the long-running living-pictures show known as the Pageant of the Masters.
- Today, it’s a professionally-run affair, a place to hang and drink and dine as much as it is to explore handmade art. And in the winter, its hippie edge is arguably softened a little more.
- For that’s when Santa Claus moves in for five weekends throughout November and December.
- Children explore the gingerbread house at Sawdust Winter Fantasy.
- Advertisement Millie Johnson, 5, and Gunner Johnson, 9, fifth-generation Laguna Beach residents, sit on Santa’s lap.
