AN ARTSY WINTER WONDERLAND

Sawdust Winter Fantasy transports visitors to a theme-park-like world where art is created in real time

- BY TODD MARTENS

CHILDREN delight in a fake snowfall at the winter edition of Laguna Beach's Sawdust Art Festival. The seasonal event, where artists sell their wares, ends Dec. 21.

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.

But no matter, if Sawdust is no longer a feisty little upstart it once was, it’s still a home for anything-goes, left-of-center art. More enticing: To step into Sawdust is to wander into a theme-park-like world of winding paths covered in wood chips, one where artist booths are fashioned as mini cottages and every turn is full of surprises — psychedelic ceramic mushrooms nest around one bend, a waterfall and a concert stage around another.

DAVID ZHANG and his granddaughter Zoey Huang, 5, observe Santa Claus at the Laguna Beach festival.