Santa's elves would weep if they knew. On a crisp Saturday morning outside KaDeWe, Berlin's answer to Harrod's, a small crowd has gathered to witness a Christmas-present cremation.
With a flourish, a man in a black and white Santa suit throws a brown teddy bear onto a barbecue. A group of children watch in disbelief as the flames quickly turn the brown fur to black.
The man, best described as anti-Santa, has devised a crowd-pleasing answer to the seasonal question: Is Christmas about gift-giving or about the gift itself?
"Your relatives don't want presents, they just want money," he shouts to the crowd. But their attention is on the teddy bear in the barbecue as its face goes up in flames. A manager from KaDeWe is watching the street performance with growing alarm. The department store's Christmas slogan this year is "Presents for people who have everything".
Anti-Santa is encouraging shoppers to empty their KaDeWe bags onto the barbecue in return for a present even Europe's largest department store doesn't sell: bags of ash for their loved ones.
"If Christmas is really about giving and not about the gift, then it shouldn't matter what you give, should it?" asks anti-Santa, in reality the performance artist Christian Roosen.
But before shoppers offer up their gifts to the flames, a police car pulls up. Seeing the approaching policemen, anti-Santa goes for broke quite literally, and throws a DM 50 (£20) note into the flames, with an audible gasp from the crowd.
The policemen push their way through the bystanders and, in a scene straight from a German war movie, demand to see the man's papers. Anti-Santa needs a street-performance licence and a fire permit, but has neither.
"But this is an artistic happening," he protests, looking to the already-dispersing crowd for support. "He just wants to make a scene," mutters one policeman to another.
After a short argument, anti-Santa picks up a bucket of water and empties it over the barbecue. He fishes out the sodden remains of the teddy bear, wraps it in gold foil and presents it to a bystander. The show is over.
Anti-Santa struck again, last weekend at a Berlin Christmas market near Bebelplatz, site of the 1933 Nazi book-burning.
But he didn't alter his routine and was offering up a few more teddy bears to the flames.
