'I'M GONNA DECK your little halls / I'm gonna break your Christmas balls," chirped Catherine O'Hara's singing sexpot Lola Heatherton, her spunky go-go boots made just for walkin' over holiday cheer in an SCTV sketch nearly two decades ago. She thus joined – well, joined and parodied – the great tradition of unstable-diva Yuletide celebrations.

Highlights in this history include the infamous radio "at home" with "Mommie Dearest" Joan and her alarmingly well-behaved adoptive children (basis for semiannual local theater event Christmas with the Crawfords, currently at Theatre Rhinoceros). Nor can one forget mom's very jittery hosting of a Luft family seasonal fete in 1963's abortive Judy Garland Show. Or how Divine's Dawn Davenport impaled her parents with the Xmas tree – never deny a 300-pound delinquent her cha-cha heels – in Female Trouble.

The latter classic's mastermind, John Waters, has twice been celebrity bait for local impresario Marc Heustis's December Castro Theatre blowouts. This year, however, our hostess with the mostest offers more neurotic drag-camp for your buck via "A Hed-Wigged Out Xmas!" Warming heart cockles, or other body parts, is John Cameron Mitchell – creator-director-star of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, of course. A screening of the 2001 film follows various live high jinks. Hedwig does Jesus's birthday? Imagine a Nico LP of carol covers, then let your imaginative crayons go Day-Glo wild over that notion.

Since its release, Hedwig has acquired a fervent cult following – not all gay men, either. One acolyte Mitchell expects will show up at the Castro is Keiko, first glimpsed at a Toronto Hedwig convention last year among "a crazy contingent of Japanese teenagers wearing Hedwig clothes I didn't realize were being made [in Japan]. All up front, screaming," he reports. "It's definitely the freaks of the world as a core audience. But they're sweet. They're not stalkers." His next move might inspire some, though. The Sex Film Project is an improv-based feature that "bypassed the usual agent route" to find actors. Why? Because (as the Web site mission statement explains) it addresses a bold question: "Why can't there be a movie that tells a strong story, is full of humor and pathos, is packed with powerful performances, and features a lot of explicit sex – hard-ons, cum and all?"

Mitchell says that after a year of workshop development, the near-complete script he'll shop around for independent funding focuses on "nine characters of different sexualities dealing with sex and love and New York and downtown bohemia." He likens the intended tone to Altman's Nashville, the creative process to Mike Leigh's and Cassavetes's. "I'll use sex the way I use music in a musical – as a language that can be deployed in various ways for emotional shadings and development. It's a comedy on the surface, but it's deeper too." His final cast (drawn from some 400 applicants) will include S.F. turned New York City club-theater sensation Justin Bond.

Showing yet another aspect to his unpredictable reach, Mitchell preambles the Hedwig and the Angry Inch screening this week with something shockingly wholesome. He's doing a performance reading of Truman Capote's beloved 1966 "A Christmas Memory." Fear not that its "fruitcake weather" anecdote might wrap the whole evening in traditional good tidings. Also billed are caustic comedian Greg Proops; Hedwig-inspired drag turns by Matthew Martin, Arturo Galster, and Fernee Heklina; and a "Glama-Rama" pageant featuring wigs so excessive they'll make you cry O!, Tannenbaum indeed. (Dennis Harvey)