Competitive Winter Picnicking returns: Scenes from Brooklyn's most ridiculous fake sporting event

It felt more like spring than winter this year, as 17 picnicking teams faced off in a muddy McGolrick Park

Well over 100 people filled a muddy field in Greenpoint’s Monsignor McGolrick Park on Sunday for the sixth annual Competitive Winter Picnicking games, a completely fake and totally absurd event in which teams of thematically costumed revelers vie for prizes in categories such as Best Food, Best Bribes, and, uh, Best Cum Shot, the latter of which was won by the Bimbo BBQ team for their spiked “whorechata.”

The Bimbo BBQ team celebrates their win for Best Cum Shot (Photo by Scott Lynch)

Organized once again by the creative collective Shadow Traffic, this year’s games saw a record 17 teams turn out for an afternoon of fun and feasting in the freakishly warm weather. But even as the event gets bigger (and less wintry), the rules remain the same: You show with a team of anywhere from two to 20 people, stake out an area for your picnic setup, pass out thematically appropriate food and boozy beverages to all passersby, and host some sort of ridiculous participatory activity.

“I love the flow here,” Bushwick resident Anna Tropicana told Brooklyn Magazine. “It’s very much a safe space for people to explore their creativity, their ability to engage others, and to just play. I feel like sometimes as adults we forget to do all that.”

Best In Show winner Dumpster Dive Bar (Photo by Scott Lynch)

Five judges spent the afternoon touring the grounds, playing all the games and enjoying endless bribes, and then went off and decide who would win what prize. This year’s Best in Show honors went to the Dumpster Dive Bar team, who built a dumpster out of wood furnished with a full bar inside, including a pool table. Other big winners included Team IKEA for Best Game, for which contestants had to assemble an actual IKEA chair while blindfolded, and the Crow-K crew, who took home the Most Thematic trophy, a.k.a. most-committing-to-the-bit.

Team IKEA made people assemble furniture blindfolded (Photo by Scott Lynch)

The Onion Ringwraiths were a personal favorite, a large gang of menacing spirits who served deep-fried onion rings from their Mount Doom volcano, as were the Cheesus Freaks, whose baptismal rite included squirting Cheez Whiz into the mouths of converts. Team Sewer Le Table, whose dishes were all rat-themed, won the Punniest award, and the Birding Man team built a shrine to New York City’s beloved Flaco the owl (R.I.P.).

Team Birding Man’s tribute to Flaco (Photo by Scott Lynch)

“People went all out this year,” Dylan Faust of the Onion Ringwraiths said. “Everyone has amazing constructions. And a big part of it is resisting consumer culture. Like, you buy experiences lots of times, but you’re not actually contributing to them, and the real shift for me mentally was realizing that the more I put into something, the more fun I have. I get to do something really unique that my friends and I will remember forever. We can all say we saw ‘Dune’ over the weekend, but we can also say we had the incredible fucking winter picnic, and we do it every year. It’s our ritual now, our tradition.”

Here are a few more scenes from a day that has no business existing — or being this much fun.