Scared of Santa Photo Contest 2025: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Scared of Santa Photo Contest is and who runs it

The Scared of Santa Photo Contest 2025 is a holiday photo vote run by the Victoria Advocate, the daily newspaper serving Victoria, Texas. The Advocate's registered office sits at 101 W. Goodwin Ave., Suite 1200, Victoria, Texas 77901, and its masthead domain is victoriaadvocate.com. Balloting is hosted on Second Street, the platform behind every promotion on vicad.secondstreetapp.com, where the newspaper operates as organization 2064.

The promotion type is UGCVoting/UGCVotingPhoto, which tells you the ballot decides between photographs submitted by entrants rather than between listed businesses, nominees or places. That makes this program a community photo contest in substance, even though this directory files it under the best-of vertical because the outcome rests entirely on public voting. It is not a readers' choice poll about local services, and no sponsor beyond the newspaper itself appears in the published material.

The Advocate is not a contest-only operator. The same Second Street account carries sweepstakes like the 2026 Q4 $15,000 Sweepstakes and the Discover 361 $5K Giveaway, plus seasonal promotions such as Hallettsville Market Days and the Gruenau Hall Fall Festival. Among that set, the Scared of Santa ballot is the photo-voting entry, and nothing else in the group carries a confirmed December-to-January window. The table below gathers the facts a reader can quote directly.

The dated record for the Advocate's photo contest

Two editions of the Scared of Santa Photo Contest are confirmed, in 2024 and 2025, which is why the program is classified as annual. The 2025 ballot carried a platform window from December 20, 2024 until January 13, 2025, and that ballot now shows a closed status. The window crosses the calendar year, opening in December and closing in January, a shape that suits a holiday photo theme built around Santa pictures taken in the weeks before Christmas.

Because the program has two confirmed editions rather than a single one, the December-to-January stretch reads as a pattern rather than an accident. If the newspaper keeps the rhythm, the next ballot would be expected in the 2026 season, appearing on the same vicad.secondstreetapp.com account that has carried both prior editions. No announcement of a 2026 edition has been published.

Several facts sit outside the published material. The list of ballot categories for the Scared of Santa Photo Contest has not been made public by the Victoria Advocate; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Separately, no conditions text covering the vote limit, repeat voting, account requirements or entrant eligibility is available for this program, so those terms are unknown rather than absent. Nomination and entry dates for the round before voting are likewise unpublished for both the 2024 and 2025 editions.

How a supporter votes on the Scared of Santa ballot

Voting on the Scared of Santa Photo Contest is a plain public vote cast on a photograph. A supporter opens the Second Street ballot for the 2025 edition at vicad.secondstreetapp.com/Scared-of-Santa-Photo-Contest-2025, browses the submitted photos, and casts a vote for the entry they want to win. The UGCVoting/UGCVotingPhoto type confirms the choices are user-generated photographs, not a directory of businesses, so there is no research step comparing local merchants; the decision is personal and visual.

What the published material does not settle is the fine print around that action. The Victoria Advocate has put out no stated ceiling on how often one supporter may vote in this contest. Whether the ballot asks for an email, allows repeat visits across the window, or restricts voting by geography is likewise unstated in the material covering the program. These points matter most in a window that runs from December 20 to January 13, because a supporter who assumes a daily rule that does not exist, or who quits after a single vote when repeats are allowed, wastes effort either way.

The practical sequence for a live edition is short. Open the ballot from the Advocate's platform address, confirm the edition year in the page title, review the photo entries, and vote while the window is open. Once the January close passes, the same address becomes a finished edition rather than a working ballot, so timing matters more than technique.

How this ballot sits beside other Texas vote programs

Texas readers have no shortage of public-vote programs, and this one occupies a distinct corner of them. The state's large readers' polls are metro-scale affairs: the Best of Austin Readers Poll, the Best of Dallas Readers' Choice, Best of Houston, Best of San Antonio, Best of El Paso, and Best of Fort Worth all ask voters to choose between businesses and services across long category lists.

The Scared of Santa Photo Contest 2025 is different on every axis that matters. Its publisher is a single regional newspaper, the Victoria Advocate, rather than a metro magazine or a statewide media group. Its subject is photographs, not businesses. Its market is Victoria, Texas and the readers around it, not one of the state's large metros. Its window is a short December-to-January stretch, not a months-long nomination and voting season.

That difference has practical consequences for anyone comparing programs. Advice written for a metro readers' poll, where hundreds of categories spread attention thin, translates poorly to a photo contest where every entry competes for the same attention in a compressed window. A supporter strategy here is about reaching the Advocate's local audience quickly during the holiday stretch, not about grinding through a deep category structure, and the ballot's own published terms take priority over any borrowed playbook.

Strengthening support in the Advocate's holiday photo vote

Support in the Scared of Santa Photo Contest comes from people who will actually visit the Second Street ballot and vote during the December-to-January window, so the useful tactics are local and time-bound. An entrant's strongest asset is the Victoria Advocate's own audience: readers who already follow the newspaper are the people most likely to click through to its ballot. Sharing the photo while the window is open, rather than before the December 20 opening or after the January 13 close, is the difference between votes cast and votes promised.

On outside help, the Advocate's silence deserves a straight description: the newspaper has put out no stated rule covering bots, software voting or purchased support for this photo contest. That silence is not permission; it is a gap, and the ballot's printed conditions govern. Anyone weighing the options can read how supporters typically gather more votes online and decide against the terms the newspaper actually prints. No service can promise a win in a public vote, ours included, and the realistic goal is more support, not a certain outcome.