Bad SantaCon: how the event went from anticapitalist protest to day of debauchery
The holiday season is a time of year beloved by many New Yorkers, but it also brings an occasion many dread: SantaCon. An annual event that sees some 30,000 people descend on New York, at its best Saturday’s SantaCon is a gathering of young people who donate some money to charity while wearing Santa Claus costumes and getting drunk.
At its worst, however – and SantaCon is frequently at its worst – the affair is an invitation for mass brawls, widespread street-vomiting, public fornication and loutishness.
It wasn’t always this way. The modern-day SantaCon traces its origins to a less debauched, more purposed protest in Copenhagen in 1974. A group called Solvognen, which took its name from a Nordic Bronze Age sun chariot statue discovered in Denmark in 1902, held a four-day demonstration during which they entered a department store and began handing out books to confused shoppers.
Solvognen was “an extraordinary Danish guerrilla theater troupe”, Mother Jones wrote three years later, with a longing for “a simpler Danish lifestyle, where American consumerism is not an envied standard”.
Any children who happen to be on the streets this Saturday, when the modern-day SantaCon is occurring, are unlikely to receive this message – instead being presented with a chance to see their festive hero presented in an altogether unsavory light.
Initially, the US adoption of Solvognen’s event stayed true to the anticonsumerism principles.
That was implemented by the Cacophony Society, a San Francisco culturejamming group, which held what was effectively the first US event in 1994.
Inspired by the Solvognen action, a group of people took to the streets posing as Santas on strike. They bantered with locals and disrupted high society parties, aiming for “a little mocking of a bullshit holiday which was demonstrably based on an unholy alliance of religious hypocrisy and mercantile lust”, as Cacophony Society member John Law wrote in 2014.
Later in the day Law, having checked no children were present, was ceremoniously hanged, in his Santa outfit, from a lamppost – “long after any tiny tots were tucked away in their warm beds”, he wrote.
The group wanted to satirize the commercialization of Christmas, and, Law said: “With the SantaCon thing, it seemed to me that we had done just that. We took back the holiday from Macy’s, from Julius, from Jesus, from Coca-Cola.”
According to the website for the New York SantaCon, the event has lost the angry, anti-commercialism meaning.
“SantaCon is a charitable, non-political, nonsensical Santa Claus convention that happens once a year to spread absurdist joy,” the website says. In an email to the Guardian, SantaCon said it has raised $750,000 over the past 10 years.
Attendees are alerted to the start point a couple of days before SantaCon, and tens of thousands of redclad people usually appear.
SantaCon isn’t unique to New York, with similar events taking place across the US and beyond, but it is the New York gathering that has garnered the worst reputation. Each year has been marked by vandalizing, public urination, vomiting and defecation, and some bar owners have boycotted the event, refusing entry to anyone wearing a Santa costume.
In 2013, despite the New York police department launching a campaign against SantaCon, a group of half a dozen Santas, and apparently one elf, were filmed brawling in the street in Manhattan. The same year, footage of one of the attendees administering manual stimulation to a man in a Santa Claus outfit went viral.
SantaCon was cancelled due to Covid-19 in 2020, but a year earlier the event featured a Santa urinating “in the middle of the McDonald’s in front of a child”, the New York Post reported, while Gothamist documented many less serious instances of Santas inspiring revulsion on public transport.
In an email, SantaCon said the event has “has changed significantly for the better” in recent years. It added: “As with any event involving 30,000 people where alcohol is involved, there are always going to be individual situations of disruptive conduct.”
“We agree that there is no excuse for inappropriate behavior including public drunkenness, urination, or rude behavior,” SantaCon said.
“This is not only prohibited by the stated rules of the event, but actively discouraged by the crowds of Santas themselves, who are, for the most part, responsible, creative, communityminded New Yorkers. NYC Santa realizes that he has a responsibility to New York City and its citizens.”
It is impossible to be certain what this year’s SantaCon holds, but given the weight of history, it is likely to be unpleasant for many, something hinted at in SantaCon’s own publicity.
“Simple and effective way to have a merry SantaCon,” a SantaCon tweet read.
“The 6 ‘F’s of SantaCon:
Don’t F*** with…
1. Kids
2. Cops
3. Bar Staff
4. NYC
5. NYC Vax Requirements
6. Santa’s Charity Mission”
Setting aside the suggestion implicit in the publication of such rules that SantaCon attendees are likely to interfere with any or all six of the above, the timid avoidance of using an actual expletive also indicates how far SantaCon has come from its anarchic roots.
There will be no war waging against capitalism on Saturday. And unfortunately for many New Yorkers, it is the Santas who will be bad boys and girls this year.