Would like an option to remove santa hat

Thank you for taking the time to report this issue and helping to make Ubuntu better. Examining the information you have given us, this does not appear to be a bug report so we are closing it and converting it to a question in the support tracker. We appreciate the difficulties you are facing, but it would make more sense to raise problems you are having in the support tracker at https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu if you are uncertain if they are bugs. For help on reporting bugs, see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs#When%20not%20to%20file%20a%20bug. There is also a vibrant support community available at http://askubuntu.com and you might consider asking your question there.

Actually, I see someone opened an upstream bug to request information on how to disable so I am converting this back to a bug.

Thank you for your bug report. This bug has been reported to the developers of the software. You can track it at: http://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/4392
I'm going to mark it as Triaged and wait for upstream to work on this. Thanks for taking the time to make Ubuntu better! Please report any other issues you may find.

It has been a year and "Work status:" is still "Not started"

Well duh! It has been 11 months since the bug was fixed.

Actually it's not fixed, because I just opened vlc and the damn hat is back.

Also VideoLan instructs to use version "1.2.0" and use the option to disable, however, I am unable to find 'version 1.2.0' to download and install, please someone assist if it exists?

This bug was fixed in the package vlc - 2.0.0~unix-0ubuntu1

---------------
vlc (2.0.0~unix-0ubuntu1) precise; urgency=low

  * New upstream release (Closes: #499381, #573064, #624027, LP: #455825,
    #573775, #695882, #705151, #708448, #738381, #743581, #747757, #817924,
    #931083).
  * Remove dropped mozilla-plugin-vlc, vlc-plugin-ggi, and vlc-plugin-svgalib.
    The Mozilla browser plug-in is now provided by a separate source tarball.
  * Add new plugins to and remove dropped plugins from vlc-nox.
  * Add new and remove dropped build dependencies:
    + libbluray-dev (for Blu-ray support)
    + libresid-builder-dev
    + libsamplerate0-dev
    + libsidplay2-dev
    + lbspeexdsp-dev
    + libxcb-composite0-dev
    - libgtk2.0-dev
    - xulrunner-dev
  * vlc-plugin-fluidsynth depends on fluid-soundfont-gm or
    musescore-soundfont-gm for having a sound font for playing MIDI files.
  * Drop all patches (they were either backported or accepted by upstream).
  * Update symbols for libvlc5.
  * Install plugins.dat instead of running vlc-cache-gen in postinst.
  * Update minimum version of build dependencies.
  * Change Build-Dependency from libupnp3-dev to unversioned libupnp-dev.
    (Closes: #656831)
 -- Benjamin Drung <email address hidden> Mon, 13 Feb 2012 01:34:02 +0100