On a Saturday morning about 15 years ago, Deb Pollack was walking to Town & Village Synagogue in Manhattan when she encountered a few dozen people dressed in fleecy belted jackets and matching red hats.
This, she knew, was SantaCon, the annual bar crawl that floods the streets of New York City with raucous, boozy takes on Father Christmas.
Ms. Pollack was amused, but continued on her way. After Shabbat services, her father, Hugh Pollack, a former president of the synagogue and a noted prankster, ventured into the sea of Santas on East 14th Street and invited one of the revelers in for kiddush luncheon.
The Santa dug happily into kugel, bagels and lox, Ms. Pollack, 31, recalled. The congregation seemed to take its festive visitor in stride.
“I mean, this is New York,” said Francine Smilen, 77, who remembers Santa pushing his beard to the side and feasting on gefilte fish. “No one really flinches.”
For more than a quarter of a century, SantaCon has a been a fact of life — beloved by some, detested by others — in a city where bizarre gatherings are practically part of the scenery.
The event began in San Francisco in 1994 as a jolly commentary on the consumerism of Christmas; in the years since it arrived in New York in 1998, critics have accused it of becoming a disruptive, debaucherous frat party.
Last month, we asked New Yorkers to share their most vivid memories of the annual Santa invasion. Readers wrote about SantaCon meet-cutes and bar fights; Santas politely riding the subway and, also, puking off the deck of the Staten Island Ferry; Santas wearing exquisite, handmade costumes; and Santas wearing nothing at all.
They described the event as magical, pointless, playful, obnoxious, creative and confusing. What no one seemed to feel, though, was ambivalence. The event has left a lasting impression even on New Yorkers who have never attended.
After Dr. Pollack died this summer, his family members told the story of his brush with Santa during his shiva.
“It was so funny,” Ms. Pollack said. “The one Santa we found to come in was actually Jewish.”
‘We Have to Go Hard’
SantaCon and the reactions it inspires are the subject of a new documentary by the director Seth Porges, who in 2021 discovered a trove of footage of the event’s early years.
At the time, Mr. Porges considered himself a SantaCon hater. He thought the event was “the absolute worst day of the year” and “the closest thing we have to a zombie apocalypse.” But then he started watching recordings of the first gathering of Santas, which was staged by a group of artists and pranksters in San Francisco known as the Cacophony Society. Organizers of the event, then called “Santarchy,” saw it as a low-effort way to disrupt the status quo.
Mr. Porges was struck by the faces of passers-by as they encountered a crowd of Santas for the first time.
“Instead of being instantly turned off, instantly dismissive or instantly horrified by it, you saw this wide range of emotions,” he said. “It could be fear and horror, or awe and joy and wonder.”
In the late 1990s, the event made landfall in Portland, Ore., followed by Los Angeles, before reaching Manhattan.
“If you’re bringing a thing to New York, we have to go hard,” said Chris Hackett, a member of the Brooklyn Cacophony Society and an organizer of the first SantaCon in New York.
Mr. Hackett, 53, thought the gathering could be a way to deliver on the reputation for mayhem and public spectacle that is part of the city’s mythology. In the documentary, which debuted last month at DOC NYC, the roughly 100 Santas who attended are captured winding through Central Park, bumping into Michael Moore on 5th Avenue and mock-protesting outside the United Nations Headquarters. “The North Pole deserves a seat on the U.N. Security Council!” one Santa shouts.
The event was meant to be edgy and insouciant, Mr. Hackett said: He remembers wrapping cigarettes in the back pages of The Village Voice and handing them out to children.
He worries some of that spirit has been lost. A few years ago, he happened to be in the West Village on the day of SantaCon. He told a crowd of Santas that his friends had started the event.
“They were like, ‘Oh, whatever,’ and probably vomited in front of me,” Mr. Hackett said.
The original organizers of SantaCon ended up distancing themselves from the event; the Cacophony Society hosted a funeral for SantaCon in 2014. But the event had already taken off among a younger generation of revelers.
Amaya Nichole moved to New York for college in 2020 — the rare year that SantaCon was canceled. The following December, she and her roommate followed the bar crawl to the basement of One and One, an Irish pub in the East Village, where they got to know other Santas dressed in red and white.
It was the least standoffish she had ever seen New Yorkers, Ms. Nichole, 24, said. She has attended four SantaCons, and this year is roping in a friend who has never been.
“I’m excited for her to experience this,” she said.
Naughty or Nice?
Not everyone shares that excitement. Public opinion of SantaCon curdled around the 2010s: Fliers posted around the Lower East Side warned Santas to keep their distance. An opinion piece in The New York Times described the event as “a parasite.”
For some, SantaCon presents an occupational hazard. The event was unpopular among the emergency room staff at Beth Israel Hospital in Manhattan, said Stephanie Stavinsky, who was volunteering there during SantaCon in 2011.
“It just kind of became a joke — here comes another puking Santa,” said Ms. Stavinsky, 55, a nurse who lives in Westchester. The event looked fun, she added, but “the side effects were not so fun for those who had to be the cleanup crew.”
Around 2015, Michael Harris and his girlfriend were sitting at the bar at Down the Hatch on West 4th Street when they heard the sound of glasses shattering behind them. A group of “plastered” Santas had gotten in a fight, he said. A bartender hopped over the bar to try to break it up.
When the bartender returned, he crouched down and discovered that some of the Santas had apparently decided not to wait in line for the bathroom. He stood up with “two or three full pitchers of urine,” Mr. Harris, 36, recalled. “It was pretty nuts.”
Still, plenty of SantaCon devotees think the event is unfairly maligned. They point out that it became a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2012, and that it has raised thousands of dollars for charities including City Harvest, The Ali Forney Center and The Secret Sandy Claus Project.
Jim Glaser, a participant in SantaCon since 2000 and one of its unofficial leaders, thinks that resentment of SantaCon is mostly a product of “lazy clickbait.” The creative elements of the event are too often overlooked, he argued.
“Jesus Christ, for every urinating Santa, there’s like 300 amazing costumes,” said Mr. Glaser, the executive director of the Kostume Kult Arts Collective.
In 2014, Mr. Glaser set out to rehabilitate the event’s reputation. He arranged a meeting with New York Police Department officials and assured them that the Santas would stay on the sidewalks. He enlisted the civil rights lawyer Norman Siegel to outline the group’s First Amendment right to assemble.
“I think the perception that was changed is, ‘SantaCon is here to stay, you’re not getting rid of it,’” he said. “‘They’ve got attorneys now.’”
Carlos Peraza is grateful he attended SantaCon on a whim in 2023. In line outside Houston Hall in Lower Manhattan, he met Tiffany Foo, and they fell into easy conversation about college, restaurants and life in the city.
The pair moved in together in Manhattan in August. In an era of swiping on dating apps, both said they felt lucky to have met the old-fashioned way.
“We usually say we just met at a bar — which isn’t wrong,” said Ms. Foo, 26.
They have not, however, returned to the event since that first year.
“I did it one time, and it worked out,” said Mr. Peraza, 25. “Who finds love at SantaCon?”
Callie Holtermann reports on style and pop culture for The Times.
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