Pomp and Protest : Activism: The season provides a forum for people with causes. The issues include animal rights, sexual harassment and feeding the needy.

It was the weekend before Christmas, but rather than searching frantically for gifts, Kathy Yandell stood outside a Beverly Hills retailer Saturday, starring in the role of the anti-shopper.

The Redondo Beach animal rights activist, along with four fellow supporters of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, were displaying protest signs and urging holiday shoppers to avoid the Nature Company.

Their beef with the nationwide retail chain, they said, was its support of the Nature Conservancy, a national environmental organization that is using snare traps to help control the wild pig population in Hawaiian rain forests.

While some prospective shoppers turned away, others, including a man who wore meat on his sleeve (well, a leather bomber jacket), went inside anyway.

“People will say, ‘Get a life!’ or ‘What are you doing for people? ‘ “ Yandell acknowledged at curbside, as she held a banner festooned with the skull of a wild pig. “But they don’t know what we do individually.”

Across Los Angeles, the Saturday before Christmas attracted a smattering of holiday-themed protests, along with more traditional philanthropic pursuits.

In Hollywood, members of the Women’s Action Coalition were scheduled to sing feminist carols from a flatbed truck decked with Christmas lights to protest alleged sexual harassment incidents involving an employee at a popular music club.

In Pasadena, historical preservationists rallied outside Bullock’s department store in an effort to persuade its parent firm, R. H. Macy & Co., to return historic furnishings taken from the now-closed Bullocks Wilshire store in Mid-Wilshire.

Elsewhere in the Los Angeles Basin, politicians, religious leaders and celebrities were hard at work distributing Christmas gifts ranging from toys to turkeys.

Sheriff Sherman Block, together with Santa Claus, appeared at the East Los Angeles Community Center for an annual youth Christmas party. The sheriff wore a black jacket and gray slacks. Santa wore red.

Cardinal Roger M. Mahony topped off an early morning prayer service by helping distribute gift boxes to more than 300 needy families living in Skid Row hotels.

One of the few no-shows on the charitable circuit Saturday was Los Angeles City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, who had been scheduled to participate in the ninth annual turkey giveaway by the 100 Black Men of Los Angeles. Ridley-Thomas, according to an aide who had distributed a news release on the event, was unable to lend a helping hand because he got stuck in a meeting.

Back in Beverly Hills, where thousands of shoppers perused the holiday-themed windows in the Rodeo Drive area, Nature Company shop manager Victoria Baloun said business remained steady despite the protest outside.

On the counter, Baloun had placed brochures featuring quotes from Harvard and Stanford University science professors supporting the Hawaiian pig removal program. If the wild pigs were left to propagate, the experts wrote, the future of the fragile rain forests would be at risk. The snares, the Nature Conservancy added, are used very sparingly in upper forest areas where hunting or bait trapping will not work.

Yandell, who wore a purple ribbon on her yellow blazer in memory of the untold millions of animals that have died for food, clothing and research, conceded that “it feels strange” to protest against an environmentally oriented firm. “But they’re supporting an organization that does something that’s very, very cruel and inhumane,” she said.

The protest was more peaceful than some by PETA supporters. In Philadelphia last month, animal rights activists dressed in pig costumes were carted off by police outside a Nature Company outlet.

Yandell said she too had a pig outfit on hand but decided not to put it on.

Several prospective shoppers, including television writer Adam Barr, 28, decided to forgo holiday purchases as a result of the protest.

“You can’t avoid thinking about these pictures of dead animals,” Barr said, referring to signs carried by the PETA people. Barr, however, did briefly step inside the store to pick up the competing brochures “to see who is telling the truth.”

Other passersby good-naturedly heckled the protesters. “My wife tortures me all the time,” a gray-haired man said as he crossed the street.

Then there were those who commented on the irony of a protest at an environmental shop directly across the block from the Carnegie Deli--a carnivore’s shrine where hunks of ham, pastrami and corned beef dominate the display cases--and less than two blocks from a major fur retailer.

“It’s the world we live in,” said Yandell. “There’s so many ways animals are abused or exploited. You have to take an issue and fight your battle on that.”

Times researcher Laura A. Galloway contributed to this story.